Why Trump’s Foreign Policy Turn Should Scare The Sh** Out Of You (VIDEO)


Here’s the thing.

Forget peacekeeping forces, forget toothless resolutions and harsh critique from that most distinguished pulpit of international diplomacy. Set to one side for a moment funds allocated to combatting hunger. Ignore the thankless task of managing refugee crisis after refugee crisis. Pay no heed to the endless revolving door of negotiation between hapless and intractable enemies.

In fact, forget everything you think you know about the United Nations.

It wasn’t set up to ensure world peace. Its engineers had little hope that they were creating a world of sunshine and lollipops. There was no vision of nations states holding hands as they skipped across fields of flowers in an endless parody of 1970’s-style Coca-Cola commercials.

The UN was designed from the ground up to be the absolute synthesis of Realpolitik. Before the plumes of dust thrown up in WWII even had time to settle UN predecessor League of Nations was stripped of both assets and ideology. Gone were visions of a future in which reasonable men met and solved problems in an orgasm of sweet unanimity.

Because the dismal failure of the League had not gone unnoticed.

League Of Ordinary Gentlemen

In place of high-minded principles, the UN was granted raw pragmatism. An asymmetric power-reality — one that cared little for the opinions of lesser powers — was ensconced within the very fabric of the organization. True power was given only to the Security Council a rotating executive of 15 member states set up with one all-important caveat. Five of those states — France, Russia, China the U.K. and U.S. — were granted permanent membership.

The power of veto was given only to these five most special of members.

In the face of concerted opposition from any one of the five permanent members, the United Nations was as toothless as an Egyptian mummy.

To The Victors The Spoils?

This was no simple power grab from the ostensible victors of WWII. The League of Nations had been set up in the aftermath of WWII for the simple reason that war just wasn’t much fun anymore. The First World War had, for example, come close to bankrupting the United Kingdom, one of the principal victors of the conflict. It also cost the lives of more than eight million people.

WWII absolutely did bankrupt the United Kingdom and this time around came close to killing 50 million people. By 1946, the reality of Nuclear weapons had made one thing clear; WWIII had to be prevented at all costs.

It’s not that war had to be banned. Few were naive to think that humanity had evolved to the extent that such lofty goals could be met. No, what was required was a system that ensured that no major powers ever went to war, or at least, not with each other.

Hence the veto.

The five permanent members could lock horns with one another to their heart’s content. Secure in the notion that no other power could impune their sovereignty, the Great powers — who would in short order become the early ‘classic’ members of the nuclear weapon club — were able to stay at the negotiating table.

You don’t want the UN to look too closely at the use of chemical weapon attacks in Syria?

Not a problem. Not if you have permanent member status that is.

The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. No major power has fired upon one another in anger since 1945.

Until now that is.

Cuban Heels

President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional decision to fire 59 missiles at a Syrian airfield represents one of the most frightening developments in international relations since the Cuban Missile Crisis. During those tense 13 days in 1962, President Kennedy was presented with only two viable ways to resolve the crisis and prevent WWIII; military intervention or blockade.

Both were risky.

As then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued on the question of intervention during an off-record meeting at the White House on October 16:

“After we’ve launched fifty to a hundred sorties, what kind of a world do we live in? How, how do we stop at that point? I don’t know the answer to this. I think tonight State and we ought to work on the consequences of any one of these courses of actions, consequences which I don’t believe are entirely clear.”

Kennedy opted to blockade.

Stairway To Hell

His reasoning was clear. Soldiers when fired upon tend to fire back.

Even in such cases where the enemy is hit with such overwhelming force that they are incapable of retaliation, there are still issues to contend with. News reports of Soviet soldiers killed by American GIs or vice versa cannot simply be ignored by the political classes.

Action demands response and response inexorably leads to escalation.

And that’s something that must never happen between two Nuclear powers. It’s also something that every president since Harry Truman dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 has understood.

Until Trump that is.

There is much to find disturbing in all this. To begin with, Donald Trump feeds off praise and many were forced to watch in horror as the media prostrate themselves before him in a paroxysm of ecstasy over his ‘oh-so-presidential’ show of force. Man baby that he is, Trump might come to equate ‘Big Boom Boom’ with the adoration he so craves.

So there’s that.

Of perhaps, even more, the concern is the fact that Trump’s lack of shame in knee-jerk policy reversal creates a milieu of extreme uncertainty. He has after all stated in the past that he would like to arm countries such as Japan with nuclear weapons in direct violation of that other long-standing weapon of universal peace; the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

Indeed, he does not seem to understand why the U.S. even possesses such weapons if it’s not prepared to use them. When told by CNN’s Chris Matthews that world leaders didn’t want to hear that a man running for president wanted to use nuclear weapons on his enemies, Trump asked simply:

“Then why are we making them?”

He’s been quite clear that he’d just love to nuke ISIS.

Confused And Present Danger

But when we’re dealing with a president who in a recent interview seemed to think that he’d fired the missiles at Iraq as opposed to Syria, the potential for disastrous mistakes become amplified to truly terrifying proportions. For those interested in the process, only the President can order a nuclear strike and nobody can veto it.

And here Trump would face the same issue that Kennedy faced. Situated deep within Assad’s regime there are thousands of Russian personnel. Even were Trump to continue to use only conventional weapons, the potential for a disaster is high. Because if Trump’s missiles knock out a couple of battalions of Russian soldiers then the chance of retaliation is high.

If he chose to drop a nuke on them?

The chance of retaliation in-kind would be 100 percent.

And that’s keeping more than one expert on such matters up at night.

For a visceral understanding of what that might look like please go here.

For those who’d rather not know, check out Trump’s pre-election refusal to rule out such weapons.

 

Featured image from Meme Generator.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm a full- time, somewhat unwilling resident of the planet Earth. I studied journalism at Murdoch University in West Australia and moved back to the UK where I taught politics and studied for a PhD. I've written a number of books on political philosophy that are mostly of interest to scholars. I'm also a seasoned travel writer so I get to stay in fancy hotels for free. I have a pet Lizard called Rousseau. We have only the most cursory of respect for one another.