Tuesday, June 19, 2018

A Moral Black Hole At The Centre


The big picture, Paul Krugman writes, is shocking and depressing:

The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

These stories all have one common thread and that is the man who occupies the White House -- a walking and talking disease who is a clear and present danger to global public health. But what's going on goes beyond Trump:

Think about it. By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty.
But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values.
The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force. (There are actually some parallels with the ancient Pax Romana, but that’s another story.)

Donald Trump, however, doesn't believe in soft power. All those kids he has locked up show again and again that his modus operandi is brute force. And he doesn't believe in trade deals -- certainly not the global structures that were put in place after World War II:

In fact, the modern world trading system was largely the brainchild not of economists or business interests, but of Cordell Hull, F.D.R.’s long-serving secretary of state, who believed that “prosperous trade among nations” was an essential element in building an “enduring peace.” So you want to think of the postwar creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as part of the same strategy that more or less simultaneously gave rise to the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

His legacy will be an empire in ruins -- and a nation with a moral black hole at its centre.

Image: You Tube

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The US has always been a nation with a moral black hole at its centre. How could a nation founded on slavery and the slaughter of indigenous people be otherwise?

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. Frederick Douglass

That speech came a century before MLK correctly identified his own government as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." The US is what it is and its current leader is in some ways more cruel and reckless than the last one.

Cap

Owen Gray said...

As I recall, Cap, Mr. Trump thought Mr. Douglass was one of his contemporaries.

Anonymous said...

Yup, you got me there, Owen. Add "pig ignorant" to my last sentence!

Cap

Owen Gray said...

Perhaps we should use one of Trump's favourite terms, Cap -- "low IQ individual." After all, it takes one to know one.

The Mound of Sound said...


I love "pig ignorant." Must commit that to memory.

This is the worst self-inflicted wound America has suffered since Abu Ghraib.

Owen Gray said...

Exactly, Mound. The worst enemies of the United States come from within.