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How strange! It took our ("our"?) president to inform us, but now we know, right? Vladimir Putin never began the war in Ukraine by ordering an invasion of that country. He was just responding to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's decision to attack Russia, or as President Trump put it, fingering that Ukrainian "dictator" (yes, he actually said that about Zelensky, even though twice as many Americans view Trump himself as a dictator), "You should have never started it. You could have made a deal." Of course! How could we have forgotten that Zelensky launched that war from hell?
And consider that a sign of the problems President Trump might have to face in the coming years. It's just conceivable that he'll have to respond to Greenland's future invasion of this country by making that vast iceberg of a land great again! Or might the potential 51st state, Canada ("If people wanted to play the game right, it would be 100% certain that they'd become a state," said You Know Who), launch an incursion into this country? Or could the Gazans attack American forces trying to turn their devastated land into the "Riviera of the Middle East"? Or might the Panamanians start to seize American ships in "our" canal, forcing us to take it back?
Yes, it's true that I'm exaggerating a little (but not much). Still, we're in an unpredictably strange Trumpian world where more or less anything might happen as, to quote TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of that classic book on an imperial planet To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, this country slouches towards Mount McKinley. Now, brace yourself and consider how Trumpian madness is leading us into a distinctly new world. Tom
Slouching Towards Mount McKinley
How Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Is Ending the American Century
By Alfred McCoy
In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming" of Donald J. Trump.
But nobody expected this. Nobody at all.
"We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley where it should be and where it belongs," President Trump announced to a burst of applause during his inaugural address on January 20th. Continuing his celebration of a decidedly mediocre president, best known for taking this country on an ill-advised turn towards colonial conquest, Trump added: "President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent -- he was a natural businessman -- and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did including the Panama Canal which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States" spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal."
Moving on from such fractured facts and scrambled history, Trump suggested the foreign policy principles that would guide his new administration, or to quote that poem, the "rough beast" as it "slouches towards" Mount McKinley "to be born."
Then, to another round of applause, he added ominously: "We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama's promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form" And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn't give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back."
In a quick segue, the president then promised to act with a "courage, vigor, and vitality" that would lead the nation "to new heights of victory and success," presumedly via a McKinleyesque policy of tariffs, territorial conquest, and great-power diplomacy.
Remembering William McKinley
Since President William McKinley's once-upon-a-time mediocrity was exceeded only by his present-day obscurity, few observers grasped the real significance of Trump's remarks. To correct such a critical oversight, it's important to ask two significant questions: Who was William McKinley and how might his legacy influence current American foreign policy? In fact, Trump and his key advisers are planning to use McKinley's Gilded Age imperialism as their guide, even their inspiration, for overturning the liberal internationalism that has marked American foreign policy for the past 80 years.
After an otherwise undistinguished career in Congress crowned by the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 with record-high import duties, he won the presidency in 1896 thanks to the influence of Mark Hanna, a wealthy industrialist -- the nineteenth-century equivalent of a present-day tech billionaire -- who tithed his fellow millionaires to create a war chest that would fund the country's costliest political campaign up to that time. In doing so, Hanna ushered in the modern era of professional electioneering. That campaign also carried American political satire to new heights as, typically, a withering political cartoon caricatured a monstrously bloated Hanna, reclining on money bags given by millionaires like banker J.P. Morgan, declaring, "I am confident. The Working Men Are with Us." (Sound familiar?)
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