Palestine – Donald Trump’s Vietnam?
The United States is (mostly) a great country. I have many friends there. My profession has given me opportunities to visit, travel and stay for extended periods. It has taken me to most of the major cities but also left spaces to explore parts of the interior that are well off the usual tourist routes. From time to time, I have been offered the chance to relocate permanently. I know people who have made a success of this but I have always declined. For all its faults, I am proud of my country and its way of life. The US, its values, its customs and its life styles are just as foreign as those of France, Germany or Spain. In some ways they are more foreign because of the illusion of understanding created by an apparently shared language.
The sort of people I usually mix with appreciate this but it is also obvious that a lot of Americans do not. They see themselves as an exceptional and privileged nation, sometimes in a special relationship with God, that represents a model to which every human on the planet should aspire. How could anyone not want to be an American? This belief is founded in high school versions of history and citizenship that obliterate many of the empirical realities of the nation’s creation. Here in the UK, we are not very different in the way that some of our people still think about the Empire. They might refer to the Rebellion of the Colonies rather than the American War of Independence or the Revolutionary War.
We can calculate the balance sheet of conquest and empire in different ways. But we should not underestimate the dangers of moral certainty in the form represented by Donald Trump and those around him. It is a version of the nation’s story that obliterates the indigenous peoples and the sufferings of slavery. If all you know is the construction of a shining city, then it is hard to appreciate that the peoples of Greenland or Canada might also take pride in their country, its culture and its relationship between material conditions and the natural environment.
This is particularly difficult when it comes to the situation in Palestine. Trump proclaims a goal of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the creation of a new Riviera along the coast. The ethnic cleansing is reminiscent of the treatment of the First Nations throughout the 19th century. Some Levantine equivalent of the Trail of Tears as the indigenous people are deported. Ironically, the coast of Gaza used to function as a resort, lined with elegant Art Deco buildings, now mostly obliterated by Israeli bombs, supplied by the USA. The Palestinian claim to the land is as ancient as that of the Jewish people. One of the things not taught in high school is that much of the Old Testament is another partisan history, written to justify a claim to spaces that were always shared and contested with other peoples.
Trump’s plan to take over the territory is merely the latest American failure to understand that others also have nationalist sentiments and national pride. It was a mistake that dogged US policy in Central America for a generation and led to the disaster in Vietnam. Trump’s plans for Palestine take the USA down the same path. Having missed service in one war, he is evidently determined to be at the beginning of the next. Vietnam began with US agents, contractors and proxies but inevitably drew in regular military forces, out-thought and out-fought by a dispersed and highly-motivated guerilla army. Will MAGA look so great when the coffins start coming home to Texas, Alabama or Missouri? How many times will the President avoid receiving them at Dover airbase?
America First may be a great slogan but the days of empires are past. As both sociologists and economists have recognized, in a slightly different ways, large-scale markets and societies cannot function without a basic framework of law and regulation that creates the trust necessary for mutually beneficial transactions. The international order is no different. Who will actually want to enter into deals with a regime that simply rips up anything that is not to its protagonists’ immediate benefit? This is Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature not a 21st century multipolar reality.
