We simply cannot know.
It Can Happen Here
That dark, sultry night in South Sudan, I thought a great deal about rights and oppression, about what happens when the worst impulses of men are stoked and sharpened, about what it means when a government turns on its own people. There, in that ruined town, young girls and women had been kidnapped and gang-raped with regularity; men and boys had been locked in a shipping container to wither and die; homes had been razed; corpses abandoned to snarling, scavenging hyenas; and skeletal remains left unburied. It was a horrorscape, a place of suffering almost beyond imagining, one that puts the problems of America's "forgotten men and women" and their "economic disenfranchisement," as well as the "rage many white working-class people feel" into perspective.
At the time, I told my questioner just what I thought a Hillary Clinton presidency might mean for America and the world: more saber-rattling, more drone strikes, more military interventions, among other things. Our just-ended election aborted those would-be wars, though Clinton's legacy can still be seen, among other places, in the rubble of Iraq, the battered remains of Libya, and the faces of South Sudan's child soldiers. Donald Trump has the opportunity to forge a new path, one that could be marked by bombast instead of bombs. If ever there was a politician with the ability to simply declare victory and go home -- regardless of the facts on the ground -- it's him. Why go to war when you can simply say that you did, big league, and you won?
The odds, of course, are against this. The United States has been embroiled in foreign military actions, almost continuously, since its birth and in 64 conflicts, large and small, according to the military, in the last century alone. It's a country that, since 9/11, has been remarkably content to wage winless, endless wars with little debate or popular outcry. It's a country in which Barack Obama won election, in large measure, due to dissatisfaction with the prior commander-in-chief's signature war and then, after winning a Nobel Peace Prize and overseeing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, reengaged in an updated version of that very same war -- bequeathing it now to Donald J. Trump.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" the African aid worker insisted to me that March night. "He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president? Really?" It turns out the answer is yes.
"It can't happen, can it?" That question still echoes in my mind.
I know all the things that now can't happen, Clinton's wars among them. The Trump era looms ahead like a dark mystery, cold and hard. We may well be witnessing the rebirth of a bitter nation, the fruit of a land poisoned at its root by evils too fundamental to overcome; a country exceptional for its squandered gifts and forsaken providence, its shattered promises and moral squalor.
"It can't happen, can it?"
Indeed, my friend, it just did.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept . His book Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa recently received an American Book Award. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com. Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of Lannan Foundation.
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Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
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