Just under one score years ago a core of U.S. fundamentalists got together to plot one of the most egregious and ill-fated crimes of human history. The plot was hatched under the rubric: Project for a New American Century. The plotters collaborated to destroy seven governments in the Middle East and North Africa: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan. They, and media corporations in the U.S. and Britain, called this war “the War on Terror”; and advertised it as being conducted by “the international community.” These plotters are also referred to as the neo-Cons, right wing extremists, state terrorists.
Today the planet is reaping the whirlwind of the plot: two million men, women and children killed; the assassination, murder and attempted murder of the leaders of sovereign states; the massive destruction of the economic and social assets of independent nation states; humungous destabilization and the spawning of genocide leading to a massive refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe; the reckless militarization of North Africa and the Middle East, and a corresponding surge in profits by U.S. military corporations; enhanced U.S. terror, drones, waterboarding torture, and the spread of terror to outlying nations like Pakistan, Turkey, Kurdistan.
Additionally, the emergence of a new proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Syria; the growth of terrorist extremism; increased polarization between religious ethnicities, and between the Palestinians and Israelis; putting under clear and present danger entire populations in Europe and the United States; and an oil war between the Saudis on the one hand, and the Iranians, Iraqis and shale gas on the other, leading towards diminished oil and gas prices.
Into this melee of terror jumps Donald Trump. With the exception of his promise to smash ISIS, he promises not military war, but war by trade. He likes Putin, who might be “a genius;” he could talk with Putin. And he loves China, Mexico, Viet Nam; but he would have to negotiate, conduct trade war with them, to get a better deal for America. The ploughshares of several international trade pacts would be beaten into swords. What cat has dragged this in? Neo-conservatives and conservative Republicanism are befuddled. America seems ready to vote him in; and they can do nothing about it.
Meanwhile, in Latin America, four of the most committed leftist (in the U.S. dictionary) leaders have fallen or had permanent setbacks: Chavez, Maduro, Morales, Kirchner; without a shot being fired. Ironically, as the right digs its heel into the Latin American left, the left digs its heel into the American extreme right. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. These two are a challenge to the worst forms of Republican right-wing terror, and to Hillary Clinton, a masked version of it.
But will Donald Trump, the Trump deal, save the U.S. from its fate? Will his formula, the pre-eminence of trade brawl over military embattlement, work? No. His version of talk, negotiation, trade war, will lead inexorably to war. There are just too many goods, corporations, trade pacts, chasing too few markets. Markets are rubbing into each other creating the friction for war. And Trump’s wall is not a wall at all; it is the wolf of terror created by the neo-cons. It is the self-fulfilling prophesy based on a self-fulfilling plot.
