The pacifist Donald and the warlike Trump

A militant pacifist

In his final speech as America's 45th president, Donald Trump triumphantly pointed out that he was proud that he had not started new wars during his tenure. He was telling the truth - he did not start new wars, but he forgot to add that his presidential term was far from the innocent pacifism he wears. America was involved in Afghanistan even before his accession to the throne of that world power, but President Trump intensified airstrikes that led to a 330% increase in civilian casualties during what is professionally called his administration. So, if previously three people died as collateral victims of airstrikes, with the Trump administration that number jumped to ten. Although in the pre-election campaign he criticizes the American bombing of Houthi positions, which he says is being led by the Minister of Defense, who - by the way - is fighting cancer, from the hospital and via his laptop, he forgets that he financially and militarily supported the Saudi coalition, which for years has been unsuccessfully dealing with Houthis bringing Yemen to a humanitarian disaster. It was Donald on the last day of his presidential term, January 20, 2021, who put the Hutus on the list of terrorist organizations. Then Biden later withdrew that decision, and recently decided to go back to the old way, and it is expected that from the middle of this month, the Houthis will receive the label of "specially designated global terrorism", while under Trump they were only a "foreign terrorist organization".

For Trump, wars are a senseless waste of human life - on this we agree with him almost entirely - with the exception that he is only interested in the lives of his fellow Americans. Modern technology has made it possible for airstrikes, and drones in particular, to minimize their own military casualties, so Trump - research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from the United Kingdom shows - used them frequently: in the first two years alone, journalists counted 2.243 drone strikes by the Trump administration. while Obama remained at number 1.878 in eight years. Minimum casualties, maximum effect. It is precisely this depersonalized way of warfare that fits Trump's profile almost perfectly: drone attacks cause maximum casualties, and do not lead to their own casualties, and do not cause excessive remorse or public reaction.

When Donald happened to be in France in 2018, he planned to visit the cemetery where American soldiers who died in World War II are buried. He changed his mind saying that there is no point in visiting a cemetery that is "full of losers". He considered about 1.800 American soldiers who invested their lives in the liberation of Europe to be naive. He later denied these claims, but they still seem to be in perfect harmony with his views that the death of soldiers in war is absurd.

Donald presents himself as a peacemaker who is not only future-oriented but also past-oriented. Speaking about the Civil War in America, he will point out that he thinks that he personally could have negotiated something and prevented bloodshed, because after all - he will say - a lot of people died. His pacifism is certainly not in the footsteps of Gandhi or Mandela, but rather one of the rather perfidious forms of egoism and national patriotism: we will act in a targeted manner, we will cause the greatest possible damage to our opponents, and we will protect ourselves. While these views are shared by almost all military strategists and bellicose statesmen, Trump only says them out loud.

The man who had a peace plan

The basis of his presidential campaign, with which he claims to become the 47th American president, is based on a document with the sonorous name "Agenda 47". The messages of world peace, he emphasizes, take up less space than the famous "government program on page A4", which is sung in popular culture. I will stop the war in Ukraine express, in just 24 hours, claims Trump. De-escalation of the conflict is the key to everything, and that requires a strong America, of course, with him at the helm. If he is very curt and concise in this regard, he was more detailed when he published a peace plan in 2020, officially called "Peace to Prosperity: A Vision for Improving the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People", which aimed to solve the Middle Eastern sadness and misfortune once and for all. . Although at first it is difficult to connect with Trump, it is a proposal worked out in detail, quite realistically intoned, but also innovative, which advocates two states. The Palestinian territory will be connected by a tunnel connecting Gaza and the West Bank - territorial integrity established, they will recognize each other and together they will fight extremism and expand the horizons of human rights. A Palestinian state will have all the attributes of statehood except the ability to threaten Israel, which will retain a security monopoly. The Middle East region will flourish empowered by a new culture of peace and prosperity, and where conflict once reigned, cooperation and harmony will now spring up, Trump's Peace, as the said document was later colloquially called, apostrophized.

This seems incompatible with the warlike Trump, who declares a merciless war on cartels, refugees, leftists on American colleges, the rotten political caste, and whom, as he calls them - the mainstream media - they present as the number one threat to the world order. Trump is a master of imagining and developing alternative worlds that, we must admit, sound appealing: a world without wars and crises, a place of general prosperity. However, remembering his previous mandate, whose military episodes we pointed out, and the rest are common knowledge, let us quickly sober up, which is not the case with his electorate, which a belligerent pacifist like Trump will continue to cheer up in the following year.

(oslobodjene.ba)