Donald Trump’s “Whenever Wars”
Donald Trump’s eagerness to use military violence, both in deploying armed forces to U.S. cities and in using them overseas, has become a defining feature of his increasingly authoritarian rule. His 2024 campaign posturing against U.S. “forever wars” aimed at regime change seems like a distant memory after the January operation to abduct Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and now a devastating, open-ended U.S.-Israeli war on Iran aimed at overthrowing its government. Just as the White House has borrowed white supremacist and fascist imagery and language from the 19th and 20th centuries to dehumanize Black people and other communities of color as part of a campaign to dismantle civil rights and curtail political freedoms, Trump is using tropes, policies, and justifications for war from previous imperial eras to destabilize the existing international order and strengthen U.S. geopolitical and economic domination in the more violent and volatile world that emerges.
U.S. militarism with Trump at the helm can appear impulsive and chaotic. His narcissism, corruption, and erratic behavior — threatening to bomb a country one day, then offering to “make a deal” the next; forming a self-styled Board of Peace, then launching the most intensive U.S. military action in decades — can obscure the logic that underlies this shift to a new, cruder approach to U.S. imperial power. But there is a logic that should not be reduced to Trump’s personal appetites for grandeur and self-enrichment, nor the temporary need for distractions from polarizing domestic issues.
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