Por Tom Engelhardt
Honestly, you couldn’t make this world up, could you? Before 2016, in what grim fantasy (or comedy) would Donald Trump ever have appeared as president of the United States? Once upon a time, I couldn’t have imagined such a possibility (and neither, I’m sure, could you!). Once upon a time, it would have been too absurd even to work as a joke.
And if you had told me, at age 24, when I turned in my draft card to protest the then-ongoing war in Vietnam, that, almost 60 years later, my country, led by — yes, indeed! — President Donald J. Trump, would be fighting yet another ludicrous war, thousands of miles away, that no one, not even the president of the United States, could explain, I would have thought you balmy. Honestly, I can’t believe that my country is now making war on and threatening further war against — of all places on Earth — Iran. On this planet at this moment, it just makes no sense. Or perhaps what I really mean is: no more sense than having Donald Trump as president of the United States for a second time.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, we were already experiencing a totally mad and brutal set of conflicts, including, of course — or do I mean, of coarse? — those underway against Vietnam’s neighbors, Cambodia and Laos, in which — can you even believe it today? — hundreds of thousands of people would die. And all of those countries were indeed thousands of miles (and lame-brained justifications) away from the United States. Just try to imagine that this country’s military dropped at least two million tons of cluster bombs on Laos alone in those years, more than all the bombs dropped during World War II combined.
And now, having evidently learned no lessons whatsoever from such disastrous wars, somehow the United States — and yes, it’s too weird not to be put in italics! — under the leadership of Donald J. Trump is at it again.
Of course, even well before that Vietnam moment, my country had already become a distinctly “great” global imperial power — there had never truly been one quite like it — that was garrisoning its military (as it still is) on literally hundreds and hundreds of bases in scores of countries globally and would end up using that military all too often in the post-World War II era. After all, when I was just six years old, the U.S. started fighting a war thousands of miles away in — yes, Korea! That, of course, was in 1950, and like the conflicts that would follow into our own era — and here I’m thinking, for instance, of Donald Trump’s ongoing, if little written about, bombing campaign against Somalia (yes, Somalia!) — success was never in the cards. So, in some eerie sense, there’s really nothing new (and something all too predictable) about a war with Iran today, don’t you think?
Oh, except, of course, that this country now has a unique version of a madman for its president and his present war, like all wars, has been pouring fossil fuels (whose climate-warming harm he’s labelled a “scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetuated”) into the atmosphere of a planet that, unlike in my youth, has started to broil in a big-time fashion. (If you don’t believe me, ask Europeans nearing the end of a wildly overheated summer there.) And that, in turn, ensures that Donald Trump can make war not just (like so many presidents before him) on specific countries like Iran, but on all of us and on Planet Earth itself.
And of course, to ensure that this piece doesn’t become too ludicrously long, as I explore the history of American military bases and wars to the present moment, I’m going to have to leave out all too many all-American conflicts in the decades since Vietnam (Laos and Cambodia) ended, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia (where US Africa Command had just launched its 78th airstrike of the year as I was writing this), and Yemen, among other places. (And that’s not even to mention such passing moments as the relatively recent Trumpian bombings in — yes! — Nigeria.)
The world, it seems, is now the president’s target-practice range and his set of killings globally, as Nick Turse recently pointed out, with their asymmetrical body counts in which almost no Americans die but stunning numbers of the Other go down, distinctly harken back to the slaughters of people of color in the colonial age. As he put it, “our” president has “made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa.” And this, mind you, is the guy who bragged in 2023 between his two terms in office that “I was the only president in modern history who did not have any new wars… I had the personality type that kept us out of wars because people knew that they weren’t going to mess around here. That’s why I rebuilt our military. We were strong. We were safe.”
Going to War Against Planet Earth
Of course, as has been true from the Korean War on, you just never quite know what country or countries the United States will be at war with next. And while such decisions were all too often surprises in the post-Korean War years, with Donald Trump they should be considered more than surprising. After all, he’s the president who swore that he would never go to war while in the White House. That, of course, was before he started clobbering one place after another.
In Iran, however, he may have truly met his match. That country’s leadership now seems eerily intent on enduring what’s happening to them, while ensuring that the American president’s latest war of choice doesn’t truly end until he and the Republican Party have been clobbered in the November elections. And hey, with oil prices still rising and the cost of crucial goods generally going up in the United States, while jobs are, for the first time in a long while, shrinking, the Iranians clearly know just what they’re doing — enduring a hell on earth themselves in order to take down the world of Donald J. Trump in a potentially big-time fashion.
As Iran’s Mehr News put it recently about You Know Who: “Continuing the war could increase political and economic pressure on the [U.S.] government and exacerbate the decline in his popularity. On the other hand, backing down, or moving towards reducing tensions, could also be interpreted by some of Trump’s supporters as a retreat from his campaign slogans.”
And honestly, what a world we now find ourselves in! Forget that I’m sweating in soaring summer temperatures and humidity right here on the East Coast of the United States, since the temperatures have been far more severe recently in the Midwest and West. Of course, parts of our planet are distinctly starting to heat to the boiling point — and if you don’t believe me, just talk to any of the French or Spanish people who, this summer, endured fierce wildfires and temperatures that hit 110-112 degrees or to Canadians in whose country, as I was writing this, hundreds of wildfires were still burning, which “our” president blames on mismanagement. (”If they managed their forests, they wouldn’t have the fires.”)
And keep in mind that all of this, grim as it might seem, is no more than the beginning of what could indeed prove to be an all too literal hell on Earth, given that (among so many other things) “our” president for the next nearly two and a half years remains intent on pouring fossil fuels into the atmosphere in a distinctly historic fashion. This planet has, in short, become the president’s target-practice range.
If this were a fairy tale (even if the fairy tale from hell), you could at least close the book, put it back on your bookshelf, and go about your business. Unfortunately, heat and everything that goes with it is now our business and, barring genuine surprises, will be so in an ever fiercer fashion for us, our children, and our grandchildren, since our president isn’t just at war with Iran but distinctly at war with planet Earth and, as in any war, sooner or later we will all indeed have to pay the price in some fashion or other.
This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Image by Annie Spratt. |
Honestly, you couldn’t make this world up, could you? Before 2016, in what grim fantasy (or comedy) would Donald Trump ever have appeared as president of the United States? Once upon a time, I couldn’t have imagined such a possibility (and neither, I’m sure, could you!). Once upon a time, it would have been too absurd even to work as a joke.
And if you had told me, at age 24, when I turned in my draft card to protest the then-ongoing war in Vietnam, that, almost 60 years later, my country, led by — yes, indeed! — President Donald J. Trump, would be fighting yet another ludicrous war, thousands of miles away, that no one, not even the president of the United States, could explain, I would have thought you balmy. Honestly, I can’t believe that my country is now making war on and threatening further war against — of all places on Earth — Iran. On this planet at this moment, it just makes no sense. Or perhaps what I really mean is: no more sense than having Donald Trump as president of the United States for a second time.
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, we were already experiencing a totally mad and brutal set of conflicts, including, of course — or do I mean, of coarse? — those underway against Vietnam’s neighbors, Cambodia and Laos, in which — can you even believe it today? — hundreds of thousands of people would die. And all of those countries were indeed thousands of miles (and lame-brained justifications) away from the United States. Just try to imagine that this country’s military dropped at least two million tons of cluster bombs on Laos alone in those years, more than all the bombs dropped during World War II combined.
And now, having evidently learned no lessons whatsoever from such disastrous wars, somehow the United States — and yes, it’s too weird not to be put in italics! — under the leadership of Donald J. Trump is at it again.
Of course, even well before that Vietnam moment, my country had already become a distinctly “great” global imperial power — there had never truly been one quite like it — that was garrisoning its military (as it still is) on literally hundreds and hundreds of bases in scores of countries globally and would end up using that military all too often in the post-World War II era. After all, when I was just six years old, the U.S. started fighting a war thousands of miles away in — yes, Korea! That, of course, was in 1950, and like the conflicts that would follow into our own era — and here I’m thinking, for instance, of Donald Trump’s ongoing, if little written about, bombing campaign against Somalia (yes, Somalia!) — success was never in the cards. So, in some eerie sense, there’s really nothing new (and something all too predictable) about a war with Iran today, don’t you think?
Oh, except, of course, that this country now has a unique version of a madman for its president and his present war, like all wars, has been pouring fossil fuels (whose climate-warming harm he’s labelled a “scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetuated”) into the atmosphere of a planet that, unlike in my youth, has started to broil in a big-time fashion. (If you don’t believe me, ask Europeans nearing the end of a wildly overheated summer there.) And that, in turn, ensures that Donald Trump can make war not just (like so many presidents before him) on specific countries like Iran, but on all of us and on Planet Earth itself.
And of course, to ensure that this piece doesn’t become too ludicrously long, as I explore the history of American military bases and wars to the present moment, I’m going to have to leave out all too many all-American conflicts in the decades since Vietnam (Laos and Cambodia) ended, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia (where US Africa Command had just launched its 78th airstrike of the year as I was writing this), and Yemen, among other places. (And that’s not even to mention such passing moments as the relatively recent Trumpian bombings in — yes! — Nigeria.)
The world, it seems, is now the president’s target-practice range and his set of killings globally, as Nick Turse recently pointed out, with their asymmetrical body counts in which almost no Americans die but stunning numbers of the Other go down, distinctly harken back to the slaughters of people of color in the colonial age. As he put it, “our” president has “made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa.” And this, mind you, is the guy who bragged in 2023 between his two terms in office that “I was the only president in modern history who did not have any new wars… I had the personality type that kept us out of wars because people knew that they weren’t going to mess around here. That’s why I rebuilt our military. We were strong. We were safe.”
Going to War Against Planet Earth
Of course, as has been true from the Korean War on, you just never quite know what country or countries the United States will be at war with next. And while such decisions were all too often surprises in the post-Korean War years, with Donald Trump they should be considered more than surprising. After all, he’s the president who swore that he would never go to war while in the White House. That, of course, was before he started clobbering one place after another.
In Iran, however, he may have truly met his match. That country’s leadership now seems eerily intent on enduring what’s happening to them, while ensuring that the American president’s latest war of choice doesn’t truly end until he and the Republican Party have been clobbered in the November elections. And hey, with oil prices still rising and the cost of crucial goods generally going up in the United States, while jobs are, for the first time in a long while, shrinking, the Iranians clearly know just what they’re doing — enduring a hell on earth themselves in order to take down the world of Donald J. Trump in a potentially big-time fashion.
As Iran’s Mehr News put it recently about You Know Who: “Continuing the war could increase political and economic pressure on the [U.S.] government and exacerbate the decline in his popularity. On the other hand, backing down, or moving towards reducing tensions, could also be interpreted by some of Trump’s supporters as a retreat from his campaign slogans.”
And honestly, what a world we now find ourselves in! Forget that I’m sweating in soaring summer temperatures and humidity right here on the East Coast of the United States, since the temperatures have been far more severe recently in the Midwest and West. Of course, parts of our planet are distinctly starting to heat to the boiling point — and if you don’t believe me, just talk to any of the French or Spanish people who, this summer, endured fierce wildfires and temperatures that hit 110-112 degrees or to Canadians in whose country, as I was writing this, hundreds of wildfires were still burning, which “our” president blames on mismanagement. (”If they managed their forests, they wouldn’t have the fires.”)
And keep in mind that all of this, grim as it might seem, is no more than the beginning of what could indeed prove to be an all too literal hell on Earth, given that (among so many other things) “our” president for the next nearly two and a half years remains intent on pouring fossil fuels into the atmosphere in a distinctly historic fashion. This planet has, in short, become the president’s target-practice range.
If this were a fairy tale (even if the fairy tale from hell), you could at least close the book, put it back on your bookshelf, and go about your business. Unfortunately, heat and everything that goes with it is now our business and, barring genuine surprises, will be so in an ever fiercer fashion for us, our children, and our grandchildren, since our president isn’t just at war with Iran but distinctly at war with planet Earth and, as in any war, sooner or later we will all indeed have to pay the price in some fashion or other.
This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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