Category: Ideology

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Mamdani’s monster move.

The shouting about communist/socialist/Marxist/Islamist by the US Right when it comes to Zohran Mamdani suggests they live in a 1950s McCarthyite time warp and/or an ideological ignorance bubble. Besides a social democratic being none of the above, the operative term in the phrase is “democratic.” He was elected in a landslide on a working class focused platform that was well known and well received across the electoral demographic (age, gender, religion race, etc.)”. Although the Right did its dishonest best to smear him with the usual culture wars and “Reds under the beds” fear-mongering, it may be the case that after years of corrupt NYC machine politics-as-usual that catered to the interests of the corporate and oligarchical classes, voters are willing to try something new. 

“New” means a move to the center-Left. Mamdani is no radical extremist no matter what the rabid Right mouth-frothers say about him. NYC has never had a social democratic mayor and given what has come before, especially recently, perhaps voters decided to not listen to the troglodytes and try something different when it comes to a governance approach.

Mamdani still has to deal with a city council, borough governments, state government and people within his own party who will force him to compromise in order to be effective. But shifting the starting point to the policy Left after years of the city government maintaining a corporate-Right bias could just break the hold of embedded vested interests when it comes to how the public purse is distributed. That can only be a good thing, especially if working and middle class socio-economic wellbeing is a major focus.

Best of all, even if NYC is not representative of the entire nation (far from it), Mamdani is an absolute nightmare for the MAGA morons in and out of government at all levels. That is because should he be successful and cast his eyes an even higher federal office, there is bound to be a lot of bed-wetting in Red States and in red parts of DC as a result.

That should be fun to watch.

On a personal note, the rightwing hysteria about Mamdani’s “Marxism” brought back memories of when I underwent my first Top Secret US security clearance interview and polygraph test (in the early 1990s). I was asked if I had ever been a member of a Communist Party or advocated for the overthrow of the US government. Although I had affiliations with left-wing groups in Argentina and then elsewhere as a teenager and young adult, I could honestly say that I was never a member of any Communist Party (basically because most CPs of that era were pro-soviet Stalinists and I was and am not into Stalinists). I could also honestly say that I did not advocate the overthrow of the US government, although I certainly advocated for the overthrow of US client dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere.

So I said “no” to both questions and passed that part of the exam. In the long form interview I explained to my interviewers from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) that I was a Peronist symnpathizer-turned-neo-Gramscian analytic Marxist whose political sympathies tended towards what was then called the “Eurocommunist” line. I tried to be helpful and told them that they should try to be more specific in their questioning, since there were significant differences between Maoists, Leninists, Trotskyites and other Marxist derivatives. In response (and I kid you not, dear readers), the interviewers literally rolled their eyes, looked at each other, shook their heads and mouthed the letters “W-T-F?” After a long pause, the lead guy said to me “we do not care whatever you were and are so long as you are not a commie.” That was the state of play when it came to official Defence Department understanding of Marxism in the year Bill Clinton came to office.

They then moved on to ask me if I “liked” men. What ensued was an interesting discussion about the meaning of “liking men” and in what context. Their basic line was that they did not care whether I “liked men” or not, but that they simply had to know in the event that I was blackmailed given my new job. My then Navy Officer girlfriend was highly amused by this when I told her about the interview and offered to vouch for my, er, “proclivities.”

Anyway, I passed the test and headed off to the Pentagon with my clearance secured. I met a fair amount of closet commies and man-likers once there.

Mamdani was not among them.

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Return to the Big Stick, with some carrots thrown in.

A while back I wrote about Trump’s nostalgia for the “gilded” era (defined by tariffs and wars) and his return to a “neo” version of Gunboat Diplomacy with his threats to annex Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal. The term “gilded age ” was bestowed before but came to focus on William McKinley’s time in office by none other than Mark Twain, who noted that by “gilded” he meant all glittery on the surface and thoroughly corrupt underneath. How prescient he was, because what was true then certainly is true now.

Here I propose to extend the US imperialist theme that was part of that era by moving onto a famous phrase from McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt. McKinley was assassinated while in office and Roosevelt, as Vice President, at age 42 assumed the presidency. More than his extensive political career, including serving as governor of New York, he was famous for his leadership of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War and had served as an assistant secretary of the Navy before joining McKinley on the 1900 Republican presidential ticket. In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediator role in ending the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War., so perhaps that is another legacy of that era that Trump (he of “I have ended eightor nine wars” fame) would like to emulate. Roosevelt was also the president who authorized the building of the Panama Canal, so the historical tie-backs do not end with Trump’s preposterous fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize or on (re) claiming pieces of other country’s territory..

Roosevelt coined the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick.” This aphorism guided his approach to relations with the Western Hemisphere, where it came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The corollary stated that beyond declaring the Western Hemisphere off-limits to non-hemispheric foreign military powers such as Spain, France, Germany and Russia (the Monroe Doctrine) , Roosevelt added the notion that the US would be the hemispheric policeman enforcing that doctrine as well as imposing peace on “uncivilized” and restive post-colonial Latin American societies.

The “Speak Softly/Big Stick” approach had five component parts:  First, it was essential to possess a serious military capability that would force adversaries to tread carefully when it came to challenging US power, especially in Latin America. At the time that meant a world-class navy (not only was Roosevelt a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy but he had written a book on the 1812 naval war between the US and England as well as several articles on naval power projection that were deeply influenced by the pioneering naval geopolitical analyst Alfred Thayer Mahan). The other qualities of the Speak Softly/Big Stick posture were to act justly toward other nations, never to bluff, to strike only when prepared to strike hard, and to be willing to allow the adversary to save face when being deterred, or when demurring, or if push comes to shove, in defeat.

It should be clear that Trump is incapable of speaking softly in any setting and that he bluffs, lies and dissembles as a matter of vulgar and bullying course. It is also clear that Trump is following Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone” with an endless barrage of inane and serious initiatives, to the point that it is hard to disaggregate and differentiate between them in order to discern the details of the content because every day brings another scandal, Executive Order, or presidential musings on any number of things.

But in the approach towards what his former national security advisor (and now indicted defendant in a Trump political relation scheme) John Bolton called the “Triangle of Tyranny” (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela), now expanded to include Colombia, Trump is clearly brandishing the big stick of US intervention, including of military attack, against them. At the same time, he is bestowing selective favors (let’s call them “carrots”) on rightwing governments like those of Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador while overtly and covertly providing assistance to rightwing opposition leaders in states led by leftists, such as the case with the (reportedly) CIA-backed, recently announced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela. This regional foreign policy approach is worth breaking down in further detail.

Since the early 1960s US foreign policy in Latin America has been dominated by Cuba, Cuban exiles and anti-communism. The exiles are an important domestic lobby with deep reach into the Republican Party but they also line the pockets of Democrats in key districts and recently have now been joined by anti-Chavez/Maduro (anti-Bolivarian) Venezuelan exiles, anti-Sandinista exiles from Nicaragua and rightwing nationalists from other Latin American countries, Chileans most recently. Concentrated in places like South Florida, New Jersey and the Washington DC area, these groups of voluntary and involuntary expatriates wield disproportionate influence over US foreign policy in the region. And a fair few of them, Cuban and not, are violently inclined.

The Trump administration is not just brandishing the Big Stick in Latin America. It is welding it to bash its perceived enemies and hapless people caught up in its machinations. It began by broadening the definition of terrorism to include narco-traffickers, who it argues sow fear in the US by supplying drugs and via associated criminal activities. It has particularly focused on Mexican cartels like those in the Northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa, Venezuelan gangs like Tren de Agua and Salvadorean gangs like MS-13 that, ironically, grew and became powerful syndicates inside the US rather than their countries of origin. The expansion of the term terrorist to include drug gangs allows the US latitude when engaging them with force, because irregular warfare groups like ideological non-State actors (say, ISIS) that use terrorist tactics are not covered by the Laws of War and Geneva Convention. Labelling criminal drug traffickers “narco-terrorists” therefore clears the way for the US to engage in extra-judicial execution of those suspected on being so. But in order to do so, the US must ignore the fact that under US, international and regional national laws, drug running is not a capitol offence even if due process is followed. So, as Trump himself has openly said, they “are just killing them.”

Perhaps in recognition of this and not wanting to be charged as a war criminal, the 4 star admiral who leads the US military command responsible for Latin America, the Southern Command or SOUTHCOM, is taking early retirement, perhaps forfeiting his fourth star retirement pay because he did not serve out a full year in that rank after promotion. He may also had in mind Secretary Hegseth’s advice to the assembled general and admirals this month that if they had any “cringe” about his order, then they should do the honorable thing and resign.

The US pirate approach to the use of force at sea has led to the murder of over 50 individuals (Colombian, Ecuadorian, Venezuelan and Trinidadian citizens) by US forces without charge, arrest, trial, sentencing or any evidence of drug-smuggling (e.g. no floating bales of drugs after the strikes even while other debris was observed on the surface). In fact, imagery of the targeted vessels indicate that they were wooden outboard motor boats that could not reach the US mainland from Venezuela (which the US claims without evidence was the originating point) without multiple refuelling stops at sea or on land, (where they could be detained with relative ease by any number of regional law enforcement agencies). The same is true for the boats presumably coming our of Colombia that have been targeted in the Eastern Pacific. By its actions the US choses to be judge, jury and executioner without warrant, which effectively make its behaviour acts of piracy. The fact that none of the countries whose nationals were killed in these extrajudicial strikes are at war with the US only highlights the outlaw impunity with which Trump’s Big Stick is wielded.

Eight of the twelve kinetic operations against” narco-terrorists” happened in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela in international waters. Four strikes have killed people in wooden boats in the Eastern Pacific off the coast of Colombia (the Colombians claim one of the strikes was in Colombian territorial waters) and Central America. Trump is threatening to expand US military operations onto land in Venezuela and Mexico, where left-centre president Claudia Scheinbaum has clashed with Trump over his immigration and border control policies. Now Trump has cast his malevolent eye on Colombia, apparently because president Gustavo Petro, the first left centre president to survive and win a presidential election campaign in decades, had the temerity to criticise Trump’s immigration policies and join anti-ICE protests in New York City during the UN General Assembly meetings at which he spoke. That angered Trump, who revoked Petro’s visa and began to launch baseless accusations that Petro was somehow in cahoots with the narco-traffickers. The message was then backed with the kinetic strikes off Colombian shores.

Ironically, Colombia has traditionally been the US’s strongest ally in Latin America, especially as part of the so-called “War on Drugs,” and it definitely has the most experienced armed forces in the region thanks to its decades-old wars with various leftist guerrilla groups like the FARC and ERP. US special forces embedded with their Colombian counterparts for many years and the Colombians use US weapons platforms, equipment and training doctrine. They are no push-over military with generals sporting good conduct medals. They are also very proudly nationalistic, so they will not be walk-overs in the event the US decides to up the ante with them. It is therefore doubtful that the US will significantly step up physical attacks on Colombian territory and nationals, limiting itself to personal, diplomatic and economic sanctions, and, of course, noisy bluster from the loudmouth-in-chief.

The image of the fat armchair general that Secretary of Defence/War Pete Hegseth railed about in his talk to the US military brass a few weeks ago is more suited to Venezuela, which has slid from the lofty “pink tide” aspirations of the Bolivarian Revolutionary colonel and president Hugo Chavez in 1999 to a venal, bloated, corrupt one party “elected” kleptocracy under his former Vice President and one-time bus driver, now fraudulently re-elected president, Nicolas Maduro. Recognising the deep weakness under the veneer of Bolivarian solidarity, the US has threatened to invade Venezuela and Trump has openly claimed that he has authorized CIA covert operations in that country. The not-so-subtly declared objective is clear: regime change and replacement with a US-friendly leadership.

That would not be surprising given that several US -backed plots have been uncovered against both Chavez and Maduro, but in this instance Trump appears to be playing a crude psychological pressure game designed to foster paranoia and factionalism with the Venezuelan political and military leadership. And if the reports of Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado’s links to the CIA prove true, then those leaders have good reason to be concerned. After all, rightwing Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan exiles are openly plotting and scheming along with rightwing US groups to overthrow their respective home governments as soon as possible, and organising to that end in enclaves like Weston, Florida, northwest of Miami. The CIA is on friendly terms with these groups. Could this be the makings of Bay of Pigs 2.0 even if the exiles think of scenarios like the invasions of Grenada or Panama? We shall see.

Interestingly, although the US is putting direct heat on Colombia and Venezuela at the moment, it has taken as more subdued approach to Cuba and Nicaragua. On a scale of openness, Colombia is clearly first–it is democratic after all–but Cuba is in a slow process of liberalisation itself, while Nicaragua has regressed into a quasi-Stalinist kleptocracy much like Maduro’s Venezuela. So why the difference when it comes to waving and welding the Big Stick? In fact, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela all have close ties with Iran, the PRC, Russia, North Korea and assorted non-state actors like (what is left of) Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet Colombia is lumped in with Venezuela as a narco-terrorist State according to the Trumpian world map. The answer may lie in domestic politics–Trump has made numerous false claims about Venezuelan gangs taking over US cities, including Tren de Agua, while the US cocaine trade is largely controlled by Colombians–and personal hubris: Trump hates Petro because the latter showed up at a demonstration against Trump and Stephen Miller’s version of the Gestapo, while Maduro is an easy to ridicule tinpot clown posing as a revolutionary strongman.

Cuba and Nicaragua, on the other hand, are getting the kid glove treatment in comparison. This may be an admission that the White House does not see them as easy push-overs, worth confronting, or as places against which the MAGA base will rally. Perhaps they simply are seen to be undesirable scapegoats given their low drug-running profiles, even if the truth is that both autocracies have hand-in-glove connections to the narcotics trade.

The dissimilar approaches are made odder by the ongoing presence of a Russian naval base in Cuba (Cienfuegos) and Nicaragua’s expansion of ties with obvious US adversaries. One would think that the Trump Big Stick would be applied equally to all of the leftist “Fearful Foursome” countries, but perhaps this is just a reflection of Trump’s personalist policy making and attention span rather than ideological enmity or geopolitical calculation. Alternatively, perhaps the US thinks that regime change in Venezuela will stop the flow of oil and other resources from it to its regional allies, thereby indirectly squeezing them as well.

What is most ominous in the evolving scenario is that Trump appears determined to forcibly impose regime change on Venezuela. He obviously does not understand the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in recent years and instead is hell-bent on showing his toughness by picking on a country that cannot put up a legitimate fight against US forces. His pretext is the claim of drug-running out of Venezuelan bases, although there has been no concrete proof yet provided to that effect. To buttress his bully move (which is an odd stance for a guy who campaigned on withdrawing the US from foreign conflicts), Trump has ordered the deployment of a carrier task force (a carrier with 5000 sailors, +/-100 aircraft, including 70 warplanes, 5 destroyers, a submarine and tenders) to the Southern Command area of operations (AOR) where an additional 8 warships are already stationed along with a US Marine Expeditionary Force. SOUTHCOM also uses Army, Marine, Navy and Coast Guard assets on specific occasions as deemed warranted, and is already conducting strategic and tactical bomber runs near Venezuelan airspace by B-52s and B-1s stationed on the US mainland.

One can get a sense of what US forces have deployed to the Caribbean to date here.

US Navy ships in Southern Caribbean. Source: Trinidad Express.

What all of this means is that the game is on. Moving this amount of assets to the Caribbean Basin, especially given the presence of land forces in the deployment, is no bluff. Trump seems to think that he can make an example out of Venezuela, contrary to historical precedent when it comes to the forced regime change going as planned or producing the desired results. One things is certain. It will be Venezuelans who suffer the most from any eventual escalation, and their scotch-swilling wealthy exile “leaders” will do nothing to shield them from a US assault.

In contrast to all of this Big Stick manoeuvring, Trump has offered Argentine president Javier Milei a USD$40 billion bridge loan as a form of bailout for Milei to make interest payments on outstanding public loans. No international lender like the IMF or World Bank would do so because of concerns about Milei’s reckless fiscal and macroeconomic policies (at one point he wanted to dollarize the Argentine peso and shipped off Argentina’s gold reserves to England on a private plane). Private investors took advantage of Milei’s public sector asset sale program to strip them of what value they held, repatriated the profits from the re-sale of those assets, then left the economy. What private investors remain are engaged in dodgy crypto schemes and destructive enterprises like critical mineral mining (lithium, in particular) where regulation is lax and where profits are largely sent abroad.

Milei himself is embroiled in an investigation into a memecoin “pump and dump”/”rug pull” scheme concocted along with Trump-allied US crypto billionaires, where he touted on social media a specific coin called $Libra that rapidly rose, then fell in value, making the 9 founding $Libra accounts around USD$82 million and leaving 72 thousand other investors with USD$251 million in losses in just over 3 hours. Milei later distanced himself from the scheme but it was discovered that he was one of the 9 founding accounts, which as per usual were managed by his sister and chief personal advisor, otherwise known as “Ms. 3 percent” for the price of the “commissions” she demands of entities doing business with the Argentine State (the most recent involving a pharmaceutical company). Milei’s sister, Karina, is also being investigated for links to–surprise!–narcotraffickers and assorted other dark forces in the Argentine landscape.

The Trump bridge loan bailout for Argentina was in fact a political rescue line thrown to Milei. His party (Libertad Avanza or Freedom Advances) did very poorly in provincial and first round congressional elections in September and at the time of the bailout it was assumed to be posted to suffer a similar fate, or at least not improve its minority Congressional representation in the national midterm elections this past weekend. That would jeopardize his reform agenda for the remainder of his presidential term, making him a lame duck and paving the way for a return of either a Peronist party faction leader or a newer centrist coalition-backed candidate. Either of these option would spell the end of the “chainsaw” approach to public sector restructuring as well as Milei’s pro-US (and pro-Israel and anti-climate change) position, something that Trump seeks to avoid.

As it turns out, Libertadad Avanza won 41.7 % of the congressional electorate vote, defeating the opposition coalition, which won 40.4% of the total number of party votes. This improves the government’s bloc position in Congress and strengthens Milei’s hand in imposing more reforms, but it also sets the stage for ongoing deadlocks and resort to rule-by-Executive decree on the part of the Argentine president. But for the moment, chalk this up as a win for Trump’s bailout carrot/election interference gambit because even if short term in nature, it may have influenced things in a US-favorable way when it comes to Argentine foreign policy. Since Trump threatened to rescind the bailout of Milei’s party did not win, it is quite possible that tis weighed significantly on the minds of voters (who still turned out in record low numbers–67.8%– in spite of voting being mandatory).

What is also interesting is not that the bailout was given for political rather than sound economic reasons. That happens. What is of note is that the bailout comes at a time when US tariffs on Chinese goods resulted in retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural products, especially soybean exports. Most of these are grown in Red Trump-voting states. When the retaliatory tariffs kicked in Argentina dropped its export taxes on soybeans, and along with Brazil rapidly took advantage to increase soybean exports to the PRC. In just a few months Argentine and Brazilian soybean exports have taken over the previous US share of the PRC soybean import market. So in effect Trump has bailed out a foreign government for ideological reasons even though it directly hurts a core voting block in the MAGA coalition. That makes neither economic or political sense.

In response to criticism of this deal, Trump puzzlingly announced that he would reduce tariffs on Argentine beef imports so that it could increase its US market share. At a minimum that means reducing US beef prices in the face of Argentine import competition., which is now the stated intention of the plan (beef price reductions across the board). Once again, US beef is mostly produced in Red states, so here too the economic and political logic at play appears to be contrary to the interests of key MAGA voters. It seems that for Trump ideological buttressing of an ally abroad is more important than the material fortunes of US farmers, and he does not fear electoral retribution as a result. That is another oddity, unless he has a plan for avoiding electoral backlash in the first place, which may be what the overall beef price reduction plan is all about..

In El Salvador, Trump has courted Nayib Bukele, the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” who offered to house US deportees at his infamous CECOT prison in exchange for money, diplomatic favours and the betrayal of several FBI informants tied to the Salvadorean gang MS-13. Regarding the latter, Secretary of State promised the FBI that he would not divulge the informant’s names to Bukele but then did so, whereupon Bukele demanded they be returned to El Salvador rather than stay in US detention. Secretary Rubio obliged and it is now presumed that the informants are dead. Here the Big Stick was wielded on behalf of a foreign government in conjunction with domestic objectives rather than used against it for strategic gain.

Further afield, MAGA operatives have close links to former Brazilian president (and coup plotter) Jair Bolsonaro’s party and his revanchist sons while the Trump administration has imposed a 50 percent across-the-board tariff on Brazilian goods as well as travel sanctions against the judges that convicted Bolsonaro and sentenced him to six years in prison for sedition earlier this year. The Trump connection to Latin American opposition groups includes rightwing Chilean figures, adherents of the old Pinochet dictatorship and new tech moguls, as it is reported to be quietly influencing the policies of Paraguay (led by a conservative) and rightwing opposition factions in Peru. In effect, in these instances the Big Stick used by one foreign policy hand is complemented by a more subtle and covert velvet glove approach on the other.

In the end, Trump’s return to a US gilded age is very much true in the original Twain sense of the phrase, and its adoption of a crude form of Gunboat Diplomacy characterised by a Big Stick/Carrot approach is playing out in contradictory but obvious ways in what Trump considers, to Latin American revulsion, to be the US’s backyard where the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine gives it the right to act with wanton disregard for International law and imperialist impunity with regard to the rights of individuals and States. Much like demolishing of the White House East Wing serves as an allegory for the destruction of the US constitutional system and social fabric, the return to the Big Stick and selective carrots is symbolic of an increasingly feckless approach to US foreign policy, regionally defined.

As the saying from former Mexican president Porfirio Diaz goes (amended here to include the entire region): “Poor Latin America. So so far from God and so close to the United States.”

Que Pachamama los proteja!

Declaration: I was the Regional Policy Analyst for the Interamerican Region and Caribbean Desk Officer in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense (OSD/ISA/IA), co-Team Leader of the Cuba Task Force and a consultant to the CIA, US Southern Command, US Air Force Special Operations and US Navy Special Operations Commands in the 1990s. In those roles I was engaged in exactly the sort of exercises that go into this type of war-planning/preparation and am well aware of the long history of US anti-drug campaigns in the region as well as the US military involvement in them (including the infamous Pablo Escobar/Cali Cartel years). My commentary is informed by those experiences and by the certain knowledge that the norms and restraints that governed the actions of my colleagues and I no long apply when it comes to the application of US military force.

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A Fool’s Pied Piper.

For a while I have mentioned that too much of NZ political “thought” is re-hashed and often washed up ideas brought in from abroad. Both neo-liberalism and “Third Way” Labour positions were imported rather than organically generated from inside the NZ body politic and/or academia. With importation of foreign political ideas all too often comes stripping of the original ideas of any intellectual depth and nuance, particularly in the fields of public policy and political debate.

The latest example of this is ACT’s pimply-faced Ann Rand adolescent devotee’s use of libertarian thought as the basis for its policy approach. In recent years its leader, an Alfred E. Newman look-alike with serious racist and misogynist inclinations, has taken to exalting the virtues of the incestuous gnome that is currently president of Argentina, a Trump-loving mutton-chopped heavy metal grunting, formerly cross-dressing evil munchkin who takes advice from his cloned dogs, thinks orphaned children should be sold on open markets, denies that the Argentine dictatorship engaged in a “dirty war” that resulted in 30,000 deaths and countless tortured and disappeared people, believes blue-eyed people are more aesthetically and intellectually superior to brown eyed people, and who is now embroiled in a crypto currency meme fraud and a narco-trafficking scandal, all while his “chainsaw” approach to public sector reform has resulted in increased poverty, lower health and education standards, increased basic good prices like those of groceries and electricity, a hollowing out of the nation’s productive base and resultant wide-spread public unrest that is answered with indiscriminate police repression. Yep, that guy.

Which is why I say again, we are currently being governed by a crazy clown posse pushing a dumpster fire of anti-social, foreign inspired ideological garbage disguised as public management best practice. Stuff that.

But do not take this just from me. Have a look at this:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/this-is-why-you-dont-let-libertarians-run-your-country?fbclid=IwY2xjawNaSotleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHrKnIv4av64qdH339gFOGvGkGitLcQD-i6TN5dvgzWwXKTzCETs-JBy8FVUw_aem_6RfYz1vosbUC6-WP9FIxxg

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The real enemy within.

Rather than a measured analysis delving into complex and intricate political issues, this post winds up being a bit of a rant. That is because the subject is simple and deserves our disdain. I shall start out gently, then get to the heart of the matter. Here goes.

One unfortunate human trait is to not learn the correct lessons from history or from personal experience and past mistakes, and to instead draw different conclusions that end up compounding the original problem or creating new ones. In politics one of the more loathsome traits is for politicians to observe what works in a different political context and then try to transpose that behaviour onto their own approaches regardless of whether the local political history and culture remotely resemble that of the different context . Another is to think that an original sin (say, genocide) can be improved upon or go unpunished with better preparation, determination and technologies, and so rather than avoid committing a similar transgression, the actor in question seeks to improve upon it. These are particularly noxious forms of conceptual stretching because they have real-life consequences rather than just be a methodologically improper substitute for legitimate conceptual transfer.

One tried and true example of this unfortunate syndrome is the “enemy within” attack on domestic political “opponents” (although in truth these “enemies” most often tend to be scapegoats and marginalised social groups). Most people are aware of the Nazi use of the term to justify their approach to Jews, Roma, Communists and homosexuals. South American dictatorships referred to dissidents and political opponents in such terms as well, labelling them a “cancer” that had to be “forcibly extirpated” in order for the body politic to survive. This led to torture, “disappearances” and mass murder as tools that enforced social compliance with regime edicts.

In NZ we now have a Kiwi version of the “enemy within” trope. It is part of a broader borrowing of US and other foreign rightwing concepts. For example, ACT emulates the Elon Musk/DOGE and Argentine president Javier Milei approaches to public sector dismantlement in the name of cost-cutting. NZ First leaders Winston Peters and Shane Jones have opted for importing US culture wars while disregarding basic environmental science, discovering that “woke” is bad and that scapegoating immigrants and non-binary people is good cover when helping pad the bottom lines of their industry benefactors (fisheries and mining, specifically). National opts for US-style corporate welfare and voter suppression ploys, trying to outlaw prisoner voting and reduce or eliminate Maori wards.

The structure of parliament helps in this regard because minor parties only need to focus on gaining five percent of the popular vote in order to achieve representation and, should the National Party win a plurality of seats and reach agreement with its minor ideological counterparts, be part of a coalition government such as the one that governs now. In short: appealing to base retrograde prejudices and ignorance works well as a MMP threshold target strategy for rightwing parties. Leftwing parties? Not so much (although te Pati Maori is doing its level best to emulate their rightwing antagonists when it comes to performative politics for their target electoral demographic)

Although the why in “why do they do it?” is pretty clear (hint: because it works), the use of US political culture imports in Aotearoa is problematic because it is underwritten by violence and the threat thereof. There is nothing debatable about this. The US has a long sordid history and culture of political violence, something that has been exacerbated in recent times by Trump’s malevolent personality and MAGA’s mean mendacity, traits that are echoed by a legion of rightwing enablers in and out of public office, cheered on by “influencers’ and commentators in the corporate and social media landscape/ecosystem.

This sewer is awash in conspiracies, disinformation, misinformation and outright lies seeking to foment social division and partisan advantage. It revels in dog-whistling, stochastic violence and projecting evil character and intent to ideological rivals when in fact, it is the Right that commits the majority of political violence in the US (and arguably NZ as of late. Think of our local neo-Nazis). And as the Charlie Kirk murder and repeated attacks on liberal-progressive “enemies” of Trump have shown (including elected officials) , it can be deadly (interestingly, after denouncing Kirk’s murder, the attack on a Mormon temple in Michigan and the staged attack on Trump in Butler, PA as the work of leftists, the US rightwing–including the White House–has gone very quiet once it was revealed that in all three instances the perpetrators were MAGA adherents and/or held extreme rightwing views).

The influence of US non-state ideological actors like Steve Bannon, Curtis Yarvin, Jordan Peterson (although Canadian born), the Atlas Institute and Koch brothers front agencies first came to light in NZ during the pandemic and run-up to the 2022 parliamentary protests. Although Australian, the Christchurch terrorist had a sympathetic circle of Anders Breivik-worshipping fellow travelers who, although unmentioned in the whitewash that was the Royal Commission Report on the attacks, were well-known to security authorities (even if he was considered a minor player before he made his move). These various ideological strands came together to meld anti-vaccination, anti-Semitic, male supremacist, QAnon and Deep State conspiracies into a broad anti-government message tailored to the NZ context.

With a mixture of foreign and domestic funding and massive coverage from local news outlets, rightwing extremist views were then mainstreamed in parliament and in corporate media megaphones. People like Winston Peters rubbed shoulders with conspiracists who brandished signs calling for Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield’s executions. Racist agitators like David Seymour spoke of Stalinist “gulags” and loss of individual freedoms due to Covid lockdowns and vaccination mandates while seeking to upend the nation’s foundational documents enshrining Treaty rights for Maori. Lesser bozos (e.g. Peter Williams, Sean Plunket, Michael Laws and various bloggers) were given platforms in the media landscape regardless of the truth behind their arguments (social media was and is the worst in this regard). For media bosses, (themselves rightwing-adjacent in spite of accusations of “leftist bias”), clicks and eyeballs mattered more than the content of the conversations themselves.

More broadly, if we consider the term “demos” (people) as the root concept in our understanding of democracy (as rule of the people), NACTFirst policies are anti-demos at their core. Denying pay equality to women, refusing to negotiate in good faith with nurses and teachers on matters of wage and working conditions, cutting health leave for non-permanent (annual contract) workers, removing nicotine and fossil fuel taxes while ending electric vehicle subsidies, raising speed limits, opening conservation land to invasive mining, loosening fishery regulations, re-opening off-shore gas and oil exploration, trying to make English the only official language of NZ and removing te Reo from official documents and public spaces, and of course the assault on Treaty rights and attempts to enshrine the primacy of private property rights rather than the collective good in law, these and other usurpations of the demos commonweal in favor of the narrow-minded desires of special interests–most of them pushed under urgency without proper consultation and deliberation—demonstrate a callous indifference, even disdain, for the people of NZ at large, especially non-dominant and marginalized groups.

Lately the ogres have turned their dark attention to non-binary people, “wokesters” of various stripes, feminists, environmentalists, immigrants (not just Muslim) and assorted “communists,” “Marxists” and “socialists” that they see as NZ’s subversive “enemy within.” And when the targets of their malevolent attention push back, the Right go all snowflake and complain about harassment, cancel culture and intimidation. We must say it again: projection much?

The move from calling people “woke” and hippy-dippy luddites who do not share NZ “values” to calling them perverts and domestic extremists is a dangerous slope towards incitement of violence against them. It is also hypocritical. Let us be clear. The NZ Right are not directing their venom at seditious outfits like Voices for Freedom or Counterspin media or astroturf disinformation organisations like Groundswell, the Taxpayers “Union” and Free Speech Coalition. To the contrary, these entities constitute part of the rightwing hate network that includes media like The Platform and Reality Check Radio, to say nothing of the more subtle reactionary messaging on mainstream outlets like Newstalk ZB and Stuff.

The NZ Left need to stop being defensive, get their shambolic houses in order, grow some spine and call out the rightwing hate-mongers for what they are. National may be more incompetent than intolerant, but ACT and NZ First are more intolerant than incompetent. Their use of US culture war language provides excellent recruitment material for narrow-minded, prejudiced and ignorant people on their side of the ideological street, but also works insidiously to incite violence against the supposedly extremist progressive enemy on the other side of that street. This gives the NZ Left a window of opportunity in the form of speaking the truth about Peters, Seymour, Luxon and their lesser associates. They are petty tyrants whose interest in democracy is instrumental, not intrinsic, and who are quick to drop democratic niceties if they feel that their social and political status is challenged by “woke” progressives.

Put another way. When a militant or agitated Left protester wants to send an ideological message, they put a crowbar or an axe through a politician’s window or pour syrup on a foreign agitator. When a Right protester wants to send a message, they seek to hurt someone by words and deeds. They say as much, and as the Christchurch massacres, attack on James Shaw and recent arrest of a murderous punk demonstrates, they are prepared to assault and kill for their “cause.” The parliamentary protests were a good example of that simmering hate and violence eventually spilling out into the open.

When it comes to political violence and rightwing claims of victimhood, the proven truth is contrary to their claims. The real snowflakes are those who specialise in race baiting, xenophobia and misogynistic insults who now cry crocodile tears about opponents “inciting” violence against them. Their hypocrisy is real and the double standard is evident.

In the end, under the cover of their vacuous rhetoric and mean-spirited actions, it is actors like ACT and NZ First who are the worst enemy of NZ democracy. They corrode it from the inside, playing by the rules as given where they are exploitable, but at heart are an anti-democratic, foreign-inspired and -supported enemy inside the walls of NZ political society that try every means possible to rig and play the political system (say, by exchanging political donations for narrowly focused political favours and by trying to alter basic constitutional principles) in order to thwart the fair and equitable distribution of scarce societal resources for the benefit of the common good.

They can shout US derived slogans and point their fingers at opposition parliamentarians as an invitation to intimidation, but the hard truth of NZ politics is palpable and cold. The enemy within NZ politics does not come from the Left. It comes from an increasingly anti-democratic Right influenced from abroad and corrupted at its core. It has a visible name in ACT and NZ First, and a willing accomplice in an enfeebled National leadership.

Shame on the lot of them. They need to be electorally booted to the curb. It remains to be seen if the parliamentary Left, such as it is, has the starch to do so.

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A return to Nature.

Thomas Hobbes wrote his seminal work Leviathan in 1651. In it he describes the world system as it was then as being in “a state of nature,” something that some have interpreted as anarchy. However, anarchy has order and purpose. It is not chaos. In fact, if we think of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” we get something similar to what anarchy is in practice: the aggregate of individual acts of self-interest can lead to the optimisation of value and outcomes at the collective level. Anarchy clears; chaos does not.

For Hobbes, the state of nature was chaos. Absent a “Sovereign” (i.e. a government) that could impose order on global and domestic societies, humans were destined to lead lives the were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.“ This has translated into notions of “might makes right,” “survival of the fittest,” “to the victor goes the spoils” and other axioms of so-called power politics. The most elaborate of these, international relations realism, is a school of thought that is based on the belief that because the international system has no superseding Sovereign in the form of world government with comprehensive enforcement powers, and because there are no universally shared values and mores throughout the globe community that ideologically bind cultures, groups and individuals, global society exists as a state of nature where, even if there are attempts to manage the relationships between States (and other actors) via rules, norms, institutions and the like, the bottom line is that States (and other actors) have interests, not friends.

Interests are pursued in a context of power differentials. Alliances are temporary and based on the convergence of mutual interests. Values are not universal and so are inconsequential. International exchange is transactional, not altruistic. Actors with greater resources at their disposal (human, natural, intellectual) prevail over those that have less. In case of resource parity between States or other actors, balances of power become systems regulators, but these are fluid and contingent, not permanent. Geography matters in that regard, which is why geopolitics (the relationship of power to geography) is the core of international relations.

It is worth remembering this when evaluating contemporary international relations. It has been well established by now that the liberal international order of the post WW2 era has largely been dismantled in the context of increasing multipolarity in inter-State relations and the rise of the Global South within the emerging order. As I have written before, the long transition and systemic realignment in international affairs has led to norm erosion, rules violations, multinational institutional and international organizational decay or irrelevance and the rise of conflict (be it in trade, diplomacy or armed force) as the new systems regulator.

These developments have accentuated over the last decade and now have a catalyst for a full move into a new global moment–but not into a multipolar or multiplex constellation arrangement in which rising and established powers move between multilateral blocs depending on the issues involved. Instead, the move appears to be one towards a modern Hobbesian state of nature, with the precipitant being the MAGA administration of Donald Trump and its foreign policy approach.

We must be clear that it is not Trump who is the architect of this move. As mentioned in pervious posts, he is an empty vessel consumed by his own self-worth. That makes him a useful tool of far smarter people than he, people who work in the shadow of relative anonymity and who cut their teeth in rightwing think tanks and policy centres. In their view the liberal internationalist order placed too many constraints on the exercise of US power while at the same time requiring the US to over-extend itself as the “world’s policeman” and international aid donor . Bound by international conventions on the one hand and besieged by foreign rent-seekers and adversaries on the other, the US was increasingly bent under the weight of overlapped demands in which existential national interests were subsumed to a plethora of frivolous diversions (such as human rights and democracy promotion).

For these strategists, the solution to the dilemma was not to be found in any new multipolar (or even technopolar) constellation but in a dismantling of the entire edifice of international order, something that was based on an architecture of rules, institutions and norms nearly 500 years in the making. Many have mentioned Trump’s apparent mercantilist inclinations and his admiration for former US president William McKinley’s tariff policies in the late 1890s. Although that may be true, the Trump/MAGA agenda is far broader in scope than trade. In fact, the US had its greatest period of (neo-imperial) expansion during McKinley’s tenure as president (1897-1901), winning the Spanish-American War and annexing Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Philippines, so Trump’s admiration for him may well be based on notions of territorial expansionism as well.

Whatever Trump’s views of McKinley, the basic idea under-riding his foreign policy team’s approach is that in a world where the exercise of power is the ultimate arbiter of a State’s international status, the US remains the greatest Power of them all. It does not matter if the PRC or Russia challenge the US or if other emerging powers join the competition. Without the hobbling effect of its liberal obligations the US can and will dominate them all. This involves trade but also the exercise of raw (neo) imperialist ambitions in places like Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada. It involves sidelining the UN, NATO, EU and other international organisations where the US had to share equal votes with lesser powers who flaunted the respect and tribute that should naturally be given in recognition of the US’s superior power base.

There appears to be a belief in this approach that the US can be a new hegemon–but not Sovereign–in a unipolar world, even more so than during the post-USSR-pre 9/11 interregnum. In a new state of nature it can sit at the core of the international system, orbited by constellations of lesser Great Powers like the PRC, Russia, the EU, perhaps India, who in turn would be circled by lesser powers of various stripes. The US will not seek to police the world or waste time and resources on well-meaning but ultimately futile soft power exercises like those involving foreign aid and humanitarian assistance. Its power projection will be sharp on all dimensions, be it trade, diplomacy or in military-security affairs. It will use leverage, intimidation and varying degrees of coercion as well as persuasion (and perhaps even bribery) as diplomatic tools. It will engage the world primarily in bilateral fashion, eschewing multilateralism for others to pursue according to their own interests and power capabilities. That may suit them, but for the US multilateralism is just another obsolescent vestige of the liberal internationalist past.

A possible (and partial) explanation for the change in the US foreign policy approach may be the learning effect in the US of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza. Trump and his advisors may have learned that impunity has its own rewards, that no country or group of countries other than the US (if it has the will) can effectively confront a state determined to pursue its interests regardless of international law, the laws of war or institutional censorship (say, by the UN or International Criminal Court), or any other type of countervailing power. The Russians and Israelis have gotten away with their behaviour because, all rhetoric and hand-wringing aside, there is no actor or group of actors who have the will or capability to stop them. For Trump strategists, these lesser powers are pursuing their interests regardless of diplomatic niceties and international conventions, and they are prevailing precisely because of that. Other than providing military assistance to Ukraine, no one has lifted a serious finger against the Russians other than the Ukrainians themselves, and even fewer have seriously moved to confront Israel’s now evident ethnic cleansing campaign in part because the US has backed Israel unequivocally. The exercise of power in each case occurred in a norm enforcement vacuum in spite of the plethora of agencies and institutions designed to prevent such egregious violations of international standards.

Put another way: if Israel and Russia can get away with their disproportionate and indiscriminate aggression, imagine what the US can do.

If we go on to include the PRC’s successful aggressive military “diplomacy” in East/SE Asia, the use of targeted assassinations, hacking, disinformation and covert direct influence campaigns overseas by various States and assorted other unpunished violations of international conventions, then it is entirely plausible that Trump’s foreign policy brain trust sees the moment as ripe for finally breaking the shackles of liberal internationalism. Also recall that many in Trump’s inner circle subscribe to chaos or disruption theory, in which a norms-breaking “disruptor” like Trump seizes the opportunities presented by the breakdown of the status quo ante.

Before the US could hollow out liberal internationalism abroad and replace it with a modern international state of nature it had to crush liberalism at home. Using Executive Orders as a bludgeon and with a complaint Republican-dominated Congress and Republican-adjacent federal courts. the Trump administration has openly exercised increasingly authoritarian control powers with the intention of subjugating US civil society to its will. Be it in its deportation policies, rollbacks of civil rights protections, attacks on higher education, diminishing of federal government capacity and services (except in the security field), venomous scapegoating of opponents and vulnerable groups, the Trump/MAGA domestic agenda not only seeks to turn the US into a illiberal or “hard” democracy (what Spanish language scholars call a “democradura” as a play on words mixing the terms democracia and dura (hard)). It also serves notice that the US under Trump/MAGA is willing to do whatever is necessary to re-impose its supremacy in world affairs, even if it means hurting its own in order to prove the point. By its actions at home Trump’s administration demonstrates capability, intent and steadfast resolve as it establishes a reputation for ruthless pursuit of its policy agenda. Foreign interlocutors will have to take note of this and adjust accordingly. Hence, for Trump’s advisors, authoritarianism at home is the first step towards undisputed supremacy abroad.

The Trump embrace of international state of nature differs from Hobbes because it does not see the need for a superseding global governance network but instead believes that the US can dominate the world without the encumbrances of power-sharing with lesser players. In this view hegemony means domination, no more or less. It implies no attempt at playing the role of a Sovereign imposing order on a disorderly and recalcitrant community of Nation-States and non-State actors that do not share common values, much less interests.

This is the core of the current US foreign policy approach. It is not about reorganising the international order within the extant frameworks as given. It is about removing those frameworks entirely and replacing them with an America First, go it alone agenda where the US, by virtue of its unrivalled power differential relative to all other States and global actors, can maximise its self-interest in largely unconstrained fashion. Some vestiges of the old international order may remain, but they will be marginalised and crippled the longer the US project is in force.

What does not seem to be happening in Trump’s foreign policy circle are three things. First, recognition that other States and international actors may band together against the US move to unipolarity in a new state of nature and that for all its talk the US may not be able to impose unipolar dominance over them. Second, understanding that States like the PRC, Russia and other Great Powers and communities (like the EU) may resist the US move and challenge it before it can consolidate the new international status quo. Third, foreseeing that the technology titans who today are influential in the Trump administration may decide to transfer there loyalties elsewhere, especially if Trump’s ego starts becoming a hindrance to their (economic and digital) power bases. The fusion of private technology control and US State power may not be as compatible over time as presently appears to be the case, something that may not occur with States such as the PRC, India or Japan that have different corporate cultures and political structures. As the current investment in the Middle Eastern oligarchies shows, the fusion of State and private techno power may be easier to accomplish in those contexts rather than the US.

In any event, whether it be a short-term interlude or a longue durée feature of international life, a modern state of nature is now our new global reality.

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A Return to a US Gilded Age?

I have been trying to figure out the logic of Trump’s tariff policies and apparent desire for a global trade war. Although he does not appear to comprehend that tariffs are a tax on consumers in the country doing the tariffing, I can (sort of) understand that he may think that this is a good way to protect US manufacturing and employment. But because the evidence that tariffs wind up hurting domestic consumers and do not necessarily bring back manufacturing, farming or employment in those or other sectors, I found myself somewhat mystified as to why Trump is determined to push them through.

I realise that he is using them as a form of leverage to obtain concessions in non-trade areas like illicit drug interdiction and immigration. But he seems to want to go further than forcing neighbouring countries to tighten their border controls in exchange of a lifting of tariffs or reduction in the amount of them (both in terms of reducing tariff costs–say from 25 percent to 10 percent–as well as the range of goods subject to tariffs). He truly does appear think that tariffs are good for the US, all evidence to the contrary.

Because of his intellectual limitations (remember my empty vessel argument of a couple of weeks ago), I then thought about his economic advisors and how they may see the issue. Here is where I think I have found the answer to Trump’s obsession with tariffs. It has to do with the so-called Gilded Age.

Readers may recall Trump speaking of president William McKinley and the “Gilded Age” when the US was prosperous, expanding and turning into the global superpower that it eventually became. He even restored the name “Mount McKinley” to the mountain in Alaska known as Denali by indigenous people and has otherwise extolled the virtues of the 25th US president even though McKinley was assassinated while in office in 1901 (Vice President Teddy Roosevelt succeeded him). As it turns out at least one person (an anarchist) was not happy with his policies. Yet it seems that Trump seeks to return to a new US Gilded Age in light of what he and his advisors see as the failure of capitalist globalisation.

Needless to say, there have been global trade systems since ancient times. Notions of Riccardian and competitive advantage were eventually developed around them to explain and justify the commonweal benefits of global trade. This accelerated with the technology-driven globalisation of production, consumption and exchange that emerged as of the 1990s and grew exponentially in the following two and a half decades. While all economic boats would be lifted by this rising tide, the argument went, the expansion in trade was expected to benefit the US the most because it was the core of the global capitalist system, including finance, advanced manufacturing, information and high-tech services, logistics and even value-added primary good extraction.

For its adherents, the post-Bretton Woods moment was the US’s oyster and free trade under standardised monetary exchange conditions was considered to be so universally positive that theories (known as “neo-modernization” theories after the original 1950s variants) were advanced that posited that joining global systems of trade would lead to rising middle classes and eventually democracies in poorer authoritarian countries that adopted the export-import logic and other development models such as the so-called “Washington Consensus.” The Consensus (by industrialised nation’s finance ministers of the time) married neoliberal domestic economic theories based on the primacy of finance capital in determining a country’s investment opportunities in a macroeconomic environment characterised by the reduction of the State’s role as both manager and direct producer of national goods and services, on the one hand, with an abject faith in the invisible hand dynamics at play when national markets were opened up to unfettered foreign competition.

As it turns out, things did not go as planned. Rather than benefit the most as the core of the globalised system of trade, the US saw significant declines in domestic manufacturing, mining and other extractive enterprises as well as a number of value-added business sectors (textiles, shoes, ship-building) when US firms migrated abroad in pursuit of cheaper labour and supply chain inputs. Even service sectors saw business move abroad–think of off-shore call and computer service centres–something that in the aggregate saw the economic decline of the so-called Industrial Age-originated “Rust Belt,” growth of increasingly precarious labor markets and the rise of a host of social pathologies associated with that decline (the book Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance sums them up pretty well even if it is a fictionalised account of his own life story pre-politics).

Put bluntly, instead of being at the top of the globalized pile, when it came to many US domestic businesses, profits were prioritised over patriotism, they moved their businesses abroad and the benefits of globalisation went to them (in terms of re-patriated profits), not their former employees and the communities that depended on their livelihoods. When it comes to free trade and open markets, businesses acted as capitalists first, and that made them globalists rather than nationalists.

The bottom line is that while the US remains the core of the global economy, the location of where globalisation impacted negatively the most within the US and the perception of its general decline as a result is a strong component of the economic nationalist discourse that propels the modern US Right. From Pat Buchanan to Rand Paul to Steve Bannon, US economic nationalists see US decline as rooted in two main things: 1) the migration of industries away from the Heartland to foreign countries which do not adhere to the overly restrictive environmental, labor, welfare and taxation standards of the US; and 2) the “woke” cultural transitions associated with granting equal rights to everyone regardless of merit while opening admission to immigrants from foreign cultures that are inherently anti-Western in orientation and yet upon which the US was increasingly dependent for both skilled and unskilled labor.

This is where economic nationalists on Trump’s staff like Peter Navarro come in. It is he and his colleagues that put the thought of the McKinley Gilded Age into Trump’s otherwise adderal-addled head. For them, a global trade war suits the US because as the biggest economic bully on the block, others will fold their cards before it has to. The belief is that although there will be short-term pain in the US domestic economy, eventually foreign countries and businesses will, for their own political as well as economic reasons, bend a knee and comply with US demands on trade and non-trade issues. Some manufacturing and other businesses may return to the US but even if they just adjust their bilateral export pricing and other trade measures in line with US demands, the view is that the US will eventually win and ultimately prosper because the advantages it has when it comes to complex economies of scale.

We need to underscore that many trade globalisation supporters did not see the US as necessarily benefitting more than others under the modern trade framework. Instead, they saw all nations receiving some benefit in excess of what they would accrue if they did not join the network, and within that “limited gains” perspective the US would still do well even if it lost uncompetitive businesses to foreign markets that held comparative and competitive advantages like lower wages and costs and proximity of raw materials, rising educational standards etc. They believed that the US would simply specialise in higher-end production and services that used advanced technologies and value-added capital goods while continuing to domestically supply most consumer non-durables like food staples and the like.

This is different than what the economic nationalists envisioned, and whereas the globalist economic vision is an integral part of the liberal internationalist perspective and institutional order codified in the likes of the IMF, WTO and World Bank, economic nationalists see the entire combine as inimical to US economic supremacy and hence an existential macroeconomic threat that increased US economic dependency on the whims of others such as the PRC and EU. Where globalists see trade interdependence and mutual benefit, economic nationalists see trade dependency and economic vulnerability The latter is the dominant rationale in the White House at the moment.

With Navarro and other economic nationalists back in the West Wing and the liberal international order in disarray for more than just economic reasons, the in-house consensus is that the time is ripe to push for another Gilded Age on the back of a tariff-based national economic restructuring. Coupled with a new version of gunboat diplomacy and carrying a foreign policy Big Stick, Trump is offered as the champion of and vehicle for that metamorphosis.

The trouble is that US capitalism today is not the capitalism of a century ago, nor is the nature of its connections to a globalized capitalist world with multiple centres of economic gravity. Think of the Middle East, the Arab oil oligarchies and their sovereign hedge funds. Think of the reach of the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative. Think of the rise of the Global South and emergence of the BRICS as an economic bloc. All of this suggests that while Trump may see himself as McKinley bringing in a new US Gilded Age, he is just a real-time protagonist in his economic advisor’s pipe dreams. What may have worked at the turn of the 20th century in terms of tariffs benefiting the US is unlikely to work in the early 21st century, at least not in the measure envisioned. So even if some countries cave to US demands on a host of issues, the chances of the US “winning” a truly global trade war seem long at best, and even if the US “wins” the economic contest, the political costs of subjecting the US electorate to consumer price hikes and supply chain disruption through the 2026 Congressional midterm elections and 2028 presidential vote may spell serious trouble for Trump, MAGA and the GOP regardless of who may or may not succeed him. The political fallout of the tariff moves, in other words, may yield negative dividends even if it is “successful” because the short-term economic pain that Musk and Trump talk about as necessary may not be tolerable for many voters, including those in Red States.

If that is the case, all the tariff-led economic gilding project may just turn into political rust.

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Empty vessel and strategic disruptor?

I have been trying to make sense out of the shifts in US foreign policy under Trump 2.0. I understand his admiration for authoritarians and supination to Putin (which I believe is because Putin has dirt on him), and I also understand the much vaunted “transactional” nature of his view of foreign relations. Moreover, it is clear that he is a racist (remember his comments about “s***hole countries”), so he has a dim view of soft power projection into the underdeveloped world and the benefits of global engagement. His neo-isolationism is apparent, although it doe not fit well with his delusional designs on Canada, Greenland, Gaza and the Panama Canal Zone (I am of the opinion that his medications have been changed in order to make him speak in a more moderate monotone even if his message remains as deranged as always) . In any case even if I can reconcile all of this, the open move to side with Russia in its conflict with Ukraine and his attacks on erstwhile European allies are perplexing on the face of it. But perhaps there is a method to his madness, so let me try to unpack things. Let’s be clear: this may be a stretch but it is within the realm of the possible given what has happened so far.

First, let start with some background. Trump is an empty intellectual vessel. He has no foundational morals or guiding principles other than making money and garnering power. That makes him non-ideological as well as transactional in his worldview. Remember that at its core ideology is a coherent set of value principles that organise reality over time and specify the relationship between the imaginary (what could happen) and the real (what is happening). That is important because as a non-ideological empty intellectual vessel Trump is susceptible to whatever advice and suggestions appeal to him in the moment. Scapegoat immigrants? Sure. Demonize transgender people? Why not? Rename geographic locations? Sounds good. Embrace Christian nationalism? Halleluja! Champion guns, state’s rights and NASCAR? Dang right! And so forth. There is nothing too petty or trite that he will not stoop to when it comes to patriotic symbolism if it advances his interests under the pretext of making the US great “again.” The ghost whisperers who surround him know this and play upon his vainglorious ignorance.

But there is a serious side to his intellectual influences. They come in the form of disruption or chaos theory, on the one hand, and neo-reactionaryism on the other.

Chaos or disruption theory posits that stagnated status quo’s can only be “broken” by chaos or a disruptive force. That force may come in the form of “disruptors” who take advantage of chaos to impose a new order of things. The origins of this ideological belief in chaos or disruption theory come from many sources but include Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberalism, who justified his support for the 1973 Chilean coup and a number of other pro-market dictatorial interventions as the only means of breaking the hold of welfare statism on national economies. The depth of the crisis determined the extent of the disruption, be they coups in Latin America, Southern Europe and East/Southeast Asia or socially dislocating macroeconomic reform done under emergency in places like NZ and England. A political disruption was necessary in any event in order to break the extant economic model via chaotic reform.

Chaos and disruption theory see the moment of crisis as a circuit breaker, a means to end cycles of social decay and vicious circles of bureaucratic parasitism and clientelistic rent-seeking. Under proper guidance by “disruptors” as change agents, societies can re-emerge from the ashes of the old order better and stronger than before.

Reports have circulated for years that Trump embraces his own form of chaos theory in which he pits his underlings against each other in order to shake out the ideas that best suit him. Although he seems to have toned things down when compared to his first presidency and what may have worked for him in the private sector may not work in the public sector (as his first presidency appears to have proven), it is possible that his advisors believe that he will welcome the “disruptor” role where he makes order out of chaos. This may be psychological manipulation by his advisors but if so it seems to be working.

That s where the second ideological strand poured into Trump’s empty vessel comes into play. Neo-reactionism holds that democracy no longer is fit for purpose. The main reason is that political equality 1) allows stupid people a vote equal to that of smart people, which in turn leads to 2) inefficient and self-destructive economic and social outcomes because elected officials and the bureaucracies that they oversee will always seek to accomodate the interests of the stupid majority over those of the enlightened few. Because of this, the ranks of the non-productive beneficiary classes grows while the entrepreneurial class shrinks, in what is seen as a form of reverse social Darwinism with a twist. Adding to the mix “progressive” policies like refugee and other migrant admissions from low IQ societies and providing social services that individuals otherwise would have to provide for themselves further dilutes the gene pool and perpetuates a cycle of dependency in the ever-expanding mass of dumb rent-seeking parasites.

The solution lies in creating an elected oligarchy that makes popular appeals and promises but which rules in a beneficent authoritarian manner, as in, for example, Singapore. It is they who know what is best for the polity and it is they who define what is in the public interest and public good. Elections are seen simply in instrumental terms, as a means of securing and maintaining power that also serve as legitimating devices for their rule.

It does not matter if this view of society and governance is a grotesque caricature of what is really happening in the US. It is what the technology entrepreneurs known as “tech bros” imagine and therefore believe it to be. Led by Elon Musk, it is the ideology of this sub-strata of wealth-horders that has gotten inside of Trump’s head. As we currently see playing out, via DOGE they are now in the first phase of implementing their vision of how the federal government should look and act.

Against that backdrop, the question then turns to US foreign policy and the dramatic shifts in it. Again, this may be a stretch but what could be happening is that the US is embarking on a foreign policy disruption and reset of its own that is designed to realign the international system that followed the Cold War. It could be that Trump (or, more precisely, his foreign policy advisors) are looking down the road and envision a new world system that, transaction by transaction and incremental reneging on the rules of the old international “liberal” order, replaces the emerging and somewhat chaotic multipolar/polyarchic/multiplex networks of the last 20 years. They are not interested in re-hashing the causes of US decline and the rise of the Global South or the ways in which international relations are no longer an exclusively State-centric and -dominated affair. They are not interested in the international liberal order. They want to re-assert US primacy after a period of challenge.

For that to happen it appears that Trump 2.0 has taken inspiration from the Cold War and is attempting to re-invent a tri-polar international system, The idea is to re-align with Russia because of shared Western traditional values and pull it away from China’s growing sphere of influence. The Russian hinge will be what balances the US-PRC relationship, giving Russia a sense of restored prestige and the US a better sense of security vis a vis the PRC.

Here again, Trump and his advisors are deeply racist in their views (think Stephen Miller) and have an abiding fear and loathing of the Chinese. The US has made clear that it wants to turn away from Europe and the Middle East and concentrate strategic attention on curtailing Chinese power expansion in Asia and elsewhere. The PRC is already mentioned–and has been for a while–as the US’s main “peer competitor,” and US war planning is heavily focused on gaming contingency scenarios versus the PRC. Trump’s attempt at territorial expansion into Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone and even (however farcical) Canada is designed to create a US lebensraum equivalent to the notion of Russian buffer states in which its interests are undisputed and inviolate (which is what Russia claims about Ukraine).

A rapprochement with Russia could tip the geopolitical scales in US favour by moving Moscow away from China’s embrace while forcing Europeans to accept new Russian-drawn buffer border boundaries and stop their security dependency and corresponding rent-seeking from the US. The US can then focus on its Asian partnerships and military planning versus the PRC, and Russia is restored, thanks to US recognition, to the community of nations (where it already enjoys support in the Global South, especially in Africa) whether the Europeans like it or not (some do, most don`t).

That is where the rubber hits the road. The move will involve sacrificing Ukraine in some form or another, be that a land-for-peace swap or some other type of security guarantees. No matter what, Ukraine will come out the lesser for its troubles and Russia will be rewarded for its aggression. But that is no longer the point because the bigger picture is what is more important in Trump’s eyes, especially if he can secure rare mineral concession rights in both Ukraine and Russia (as has been discussed lately, something that demonstrates the power of US coercive diplomacy versus Ukraine and the power of Russian persuasive diplomacy versus the US). The stagnation of the Ruso-Ukrainian war invites the application of disruption theory to the conflict, even if there will be significant collateral damage to Ukraine and US-European relations as a result.

This gambit also rests on the assumption that Russia is an honest actor and will in fact prefer to normalize relations with the US while distancing itself from the PRC (since it would be part of any negotiations to betray Ukraine unless Trump is completely owned by Putin). That may be a mistaken belief, which would make all the claims about Trump’s ability to play “three dimensional chess” a bit of a pipe dream. It also discounts the PRC reaction, which also would be a mistake.

The bottom line is that precisely because Trump is an empty intellectual and ideological vessel he is more susceptible than other presidents to the suggestions of his advisors, especially when they appeal to his narcissism and bigotry. Chaos or disruption theory-derived policy recommendations are a good way of doing so, especially when coupled with the suggestion that he is the only “King” (remember last week’s White House-generated Time Magazine cover) capable of imposing a new order both at home and abroad. If that advice is coupled with suggestions that the pivot towards Russia could earn him the Nobel Peace Prize (something that he has repeatedly said that he thinks that he deserves), then the neoreactionary ideological project will have started to bear fruit in terms of US foreign relations.

Judging from what is going on in terms of changes to US domestic policy under Trump 2.0, the strategic shift in foreign policy appears to be just one side of the disruptor’s coin. But is that a coin secured in hand by a long-term strategic plan or one that is simply being tossed to see how it lands?

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The politics of cruelty.

What seems to be the common theme in the US, NZ, Argentina and places like Italy under their respective rightwing governments is what I think of as “the politics of cruelty.” Hate-mongering, callous indifference in social policy-making, corporate toadying, political bullying, intimidation and punching down on the most vulnerable with seemingly unrestrained glee seem to be a hallmark of their respective approaches to governance. The fact that they share ideological and organisational ties through entities like the Atlas Network and Heritage Foundation suggests that this common approach is orchestrated rather than spontaneous and comes from the top down from conservative elites rather as an expression of the desires of the voting grassroots.

To be clear, they all won open elections fairly, albeit not by as wide margins as they claim, so their “mandates’ are a bit more tenuous than they may appear at first glance. But it is not so much whether they have large electoral margins of victory that matters but how they have chosen to exercise power once having won. On that score the post-election moment is alarming and the trend is authoritarian. What fuels this trend is belief in the power of “chaos theory,” where “disruptors” smash the system as given in order to achieve social, economic and political break-throughs after a period of stagnation and decline. This has been an ontological pillar of modern neo-Right thought–out of chaos and disorder comes rebirth–but it requires the firm hand of a determined leadership to push through the needed changes against the wishes of a reluctant or opposed polity.

In addition, although they all have their own variants of rightwing approaches to policy-making, be they MAGA populism (US), anarcho-capitalism (Argentina), post-neoliberalism (NZ) or neofascism (Italy), every one of these governments has elements of the “neoreactionary” movement growing strength in global rightwing circles. That movement sees liberal democracy as terminally flawed because it allows less-intelligent people to vote, which in turn produces political societies dominated by inefficiency, waste and rent-seeking collusion between public bureaucrats, their clients and feckless and avaricious politicians. For the neoreactionary movement, rule by a “monarchy” of corporate technocrats (e.g., Musk and Thiel) is preferable even if not possible over the short term. The new ‘masters of the universe” come from Silicone Valley rather than Wall Street, and are supported by legions of so-called “groypers” (younger rightwing ideologues and trolls) who serve as the foot soldiers of the new political-technocratic order.

At a political level, given the impossibility of immediately dispensing with elections and installing direct rule by the technocratic elite (as the leading edge of capitalism, now replacing finance capital), the short term remedy is therefore to elect “strong” leaders who rule by decree, fast-track legislation and/or emergency powers in which a Blitzkrieg approach is applied to institutional reform without regard to legal niceties or constitutional norms. The idea is to throw policy reforms against the societal wall and see what sticks given economic, socio-political and legal conditions. And given the pervasive influence of what can be called the attention-seeking (as opposed to information-seeking) culture accelerated by social media, this aim-at-the-wall approach flies below the radar of scrutiny by a public and mass media obsessed with clicks, likes and selfies rather than the incremental slide into authoritarianism. Because of that campaigns can be based on lies, disinformation and primal scapegoating of designated “others” because the ends justify the means. Elections have no intrinsic worth other than as serving as another instrument by which power is attained, and the turn towards authoritarian cruelty is the manner in which the spoils of victory are shared by election winners.

Not surprisingly given the above, in all of these cases rammed-through reforms have stuck. It remains to be seen what the long term effect will be or whether successful challenges can be mounted against them, but the disruptor neoreactionaries are on the rise and disruption is at play with no effective counterweight yet in sight.

For the time being, it appears that an era of darkness has descended upon us.

***Thanks to Lorenzo Wachter Buchanan and Dr. Jeanne Guthrie for their insights on this subject.***

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US military-industrial-sports complex.

A US friend of mine wrote on social media about attending a Homecoming football game at her niece’s Red State university. Although the referees stunk and her team lost, my friend said that she enjoyed her visit, especially the halftime show that featured a tribute to veterans (it is approaching Veterans Day in the US). Because I have a self-righteous contrarian streak, I commented on her post by asking when did glorification of militarism and (by extension) war-mongering became a fixture US sports? I suggested that maybe it came from US military service academies (West Point, the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy) and somehow leaked into other sports institutions sometime after WW2. Not surprisingly given that my friend is a very patriotic and polite American, she declined to answer.

What I would have said to her had she answered is that I asked because cultural historians and sociologists have noted that although all liberal democracies have military ceremonies, displays, celebrations and commemorations on significant national dates and public holidays such as Anzac Day and Bastille Day, only the US has military displays at private sporting events from Little League to the professional level pretty much every week. American football, baseball, basketball, automobile racing (NASCAR is a patriotism fetishist’s delight), soccer, ice hockey, volleyball, lacrosse–these and more all regularly feature tributes to the military, with some including static and moving exhibits of death machines in the forms of warplane fly-overs, paratroop drops, assorted artillery gun salutes and even the occasional tank. Remember, this is not July 4th, Veterans Day or Memorial Day, which are genuine national holidays celebrated publicly with displays of patriotism, parades, picnics, pomp and circumstance even if the original, more sombre reason for them was about victory, sacrifice and service to the country, not the military per se.

So why and how did sports get turned into an adjunct to US militarism? Beyond the constant invocations of “fighting for freedom” (I guess “fighting for imperialism and “making the world more safe for Yanks” does not have quite the same ring to them), what normalised this practice?

Here is my hunch. At some point in the last half century a PR genius in the Department of Defense (DoD) realised that combining sports, especially “manly” contact sports, with militaristic displays and tributes framed as patriotic commemorations was a natural recruitment tool for the armed forces. The US military is already allowed to recruit in high schools and universities (some private schools refuse them but all public institutions receiving federal funding of any sort must allow military recruiters on campus). But sports, especially big-ticket sports like college and professional football, is a type of social glue that binds American society in a way that pretty much everything else does not. Race, class, religion, geographic location, now even gender–all bow before the alter of sports, with stadiums being the secular churches in which people congregate for common purpose. If you want to make friends and influence people by participating in the ritual, a sporting event is a good place to start.

(I use “American” here well aware that is is an appropriation of a continental name common to all of the Western Hemisphere simply because it has become normalised as a way to identify people from the US).

Partnering with sports is therefore way for the US military to get deeply involved in a core aspect of US society–the glue that holds together its social cohesion–by becoming an integral part not only of its sporting culture but also of its national identity. That perhaps is where US militarism is reproduced at its most basic level. If you can get people to adopt a certain favourable (and non-critical) mindset and predisposition regarding the military and its role in US society through sports, you pave the way for ideological reproduction of a military-aligned perspective. That in turn makes recruitment easier but also makes it easier to sell rationales for aggressive foreign polices, large military budgets and ultimately, war-mongering as a foreign policy tool. You can see the results in a number of popular culture artefacts: marching bands, camouflage apparel, guns, more guns and assorted accessories for guns (like bump stocks, silencers and extended magazines) in case the zombie finally arrive from south of the border, “tactical gear,” militarised local police forces, etc, to say nothing of the names of numerous sports teams themselves. You see it in the media, especially among conservative outlets. You see it in language, such as in the overuse of the word “heroes” to describe anyone who has served. You see it in oversized flags with Vietnam Era POW-MIA logos at car and gun dealerships, in the retail discounts offered to active duty service members and veterans and in the veneration of the military in churches. Militarism (I shall refrain from calling it military fetishism) permeates every aspect of US social life, and sports is at its core. I am not saying that there are no legitimate spinoffs and benefits from exposure to military culture and technologies, but in the US sometimes the crossover is a bit too much.

This occurs in spite of the fact that US in recent decades has not been particularly successful in war. For every victory in Granada, Panama or Gulf War One and in spite of overwhelming advantages in weaponry (courtesy of those enormous military budgets), most recent US expeditionary wars have ended in stalemates and withdrawal–sometimes chaotic–in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in a number of “low intensity conflicts” such as those in Niger, Somalia, and 1980s Lebanon. In fact, the US has been continuously at war, big or small, for the better part of my existence, and yet the world is arguably more dangerous today for the US than it was before it became the world’s policeman. Where is the national interest cost/benefit value in this?

That is where what former general and President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s phrase enters the frame: “military-industrial complex.” Ike warned about the emerging military-industrial complex in the 1950s, arguing that it was leading to distortions in foreign policy, particularly those associated with militarism for profit. Needless to say he was shouting into the dark because the beast that he was looking at then is now a Godzilla that through lobbying controls the Federal Executive and Legislative branches as well as those of most if not all states and even local districts. From the United Fruit Company’s backing of coups in Central America in the 1950s and 60s things have evolved into a conglomerate of blood-soaked profiteers ranging from Blackwater in the 1990s ((now rebranded and decentralised under shell fronts) to assorted outfits supplying staples, fuel, transportation, close personal protection, anti-piracy squads and even Halloween costumes to the troops deployed abroad. Godzilla is now too big too fail.

Godzilla is also very smart. By marrying the military-industrial complex to the sports-military complex it has created the prefect vehicle for the profitable reproduction of a permanent militarist outlook as a cornerstone of US society. I’ll say it again, bloodshed is profitable and if sports is means for the military-industrial complex to profit, it has found a welcome partner. It is therefore not surprising that sports moguls and big entertainment companies, including dodgy outfits like those that control cage fighting and staged wrestling competitions, have partnered with the armed services in order for both to sell their “product.” The arrangement works well for the synergistic (some might say “symbiotic”) enhancement of their bottom lines.

So what we have in the US is a military-industrial-sports complex that serves as an ideological and material war-mongering reproduction machine. Only in America!

And now, a digression.

I had my “Ike moment” in 1994 when the Zapatistas staged an uprising in Chiapas Province, Mexico. Initially overwhelmed by the guerrilla assaults, the Mexican Army sent an urgent request for helicopter gunships, armoured personnel carriers and special operations troops. This, in spite fo the fact that up and until that moment Mexico styled itself to be a leader of the non-aligned movement, one of the “old school” revolutionary regimes dating to the early 20th century and regularly gave the US the finger in international forums. Its authorities were not very cooperative when it came to the illegal drug trade, something that made some of them rich, made more of them dead, and which made all of them regret their indifference down the road.

Well as it turns out on January 1, 1994 I just happened to be the regional policy analyst for the InterAmerican region in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and got called into my office to consider the request before sending it up the chain of command on the way to the White House. I explained to a group of formidable civilian and military leaders (some of whom I still admire), that a rebellion/revolt like that of the Zapatistas (known by the acronym EZLN in Spanish and led by the much vaunted “Comandante Marcos”) was rooted in socio-economic inequality and broken government promises, not some global Marxist conspiracy. It was a symptom, not a cause of instability and therefore could not be solved via US military intervention (or any use of force, for that matter). I advised against agreeing to the request and instead recommended that the Mexicans tend to their internal affairs by listening to the EZLN demands and proposing a negotiated solution. After all, they were on the right side of history, only sought was was promised to the peasantry in the 1930s, and had no means or intentions of expanding their armed activities to make revolution at the national level.

Historical Note: The EZLN were acting on historical campesino (peasant) grievances about having their communal (State-owned) land holdings (known as ejidos) taken over by large private land owning entities in spite the promise made by the post-revolutionary government of Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s. After years of dispossessions and usurpation by Cardenas’s political heirs working hand in glove with landed agricultural elites, Maoist and Guevara-inspired guerrilla forces emerged in the 1980s and finally began the forcible reclamation project on New Year’s Day 1994. Talk about starting that year with a bang!

My comments to the Pentagon brass fell on deaf ears. To their credit the uniforms in the room were more sympathetic to my view than were my civilian counterparts, but the overall response was silence. A day or so later I was passed an interagency memo signed off by the NSC, CIA, NSA, JCS, Treasury, my bosses in OSD, the department of the Army and various other lesser agencies authorising a limited provision of the requested items subject to the condition that they “respect all national and International humanitarian conventions and the laws of war.”

Yeah, right. I may not have known it at the time, but a Yanqui Tui ad was in the making.

I was young and stroppy at the time so in response I fired off an interagency reply denouncing the decision, pointing out the few of those who signed off had expertise In Mexican history history and affairs, much less the history of Chiapas (the poorest state in Mexico) or the nature of the rebellion, and some did not even speak or read Spanish. I received no replies and the project was approved.

A few days later I was summoned for a private lunch by a very senior DoD official. That was unusual because a mid-level C ring analyst like me did not usually get a 1-on-1 invitation to meet with an E ring heavyweight (the Pentagon is divided into five rings running five stories high and five deep on each side, connected by internal corridors and with the service branches controlling three sides of the Pentagon and the Office of the Secretary of Defence for which I worked controlling the side that faces the Potomac River from the West. With the best views and largest offices, the E ring was where the civilian big boys and girls played. Among a lot of source on the building, see: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pentagon)

The official complimented me on my knowledge of the region, the detail and energy that I brought to my job and the good work that I had done while serving in OSD/DoD. But he suggested that when my initial term expired I should return to academia and eventually write (once my security clearance lapsed) about my experiences there (subject to review and approval by DoD compliance mechanisms). Since I was hoping to extend my tenure in OSD I asked if the memo had something to do with his suggestion, to which he replied “yes.” I said that I thought that my job was to protect the US best interests in Latin America, balancing hard reality with as much idealism on human rights etc. as could be mustered under the circumstances (remember this was in the first couple of years of the first Clinton administration, when the US was pushing a so-called “Cooperative Security” doctrine based on confidence and security-building measures (CSBMs) as a replacement for Cold War “collective security” agreements based on credible counter-force). Since the Cold War had ended, part of my remit was to write the Latin American component of the new doctrine given the changed realities in my area of responsibility (Latin America and the Caribbean, which at the time meant that narco-trafficking and guerrilla warfare were the main concerns). His reply was to say “yes, that is true and commendable but you must understand that in this city corporate interests prevail.”

I left a short while after that conversation and a couple of years later emigrated to NZ. In the 25 years since then I have never once been asked by anyone in NZ government, academia, and the private sector about my experiences in that role, although when I was an academic I did illustrate to my students objective examples of foreign and security policy problems based on those experiences.

Instead, after 9/11 I got branded by the NZ (and now foreign) media as a security or terrorism “expert” when it fact those were just routine aspects–but not all of–what I did at OSD (TBH, I cringe when I am referred to as a security expert because those are people who install and maintain home and commercial alarm systems. And since terrorism “expertise” has become a cottage industry since 9/11, mostly directed at Islamicists (including in NZ), I would prefer to not be associated with those that currently embrace the label. Remember: terrorism is a tactic in unconventional, irregular and hybrid warfare (and sometimes even in conventional warfare if the laws of war are deliberately violated, as has been seen in recent times), but not an end in itself. Focusing on it is to consequently misses the forest for the trees (much like the US approach to the Zapatistas), something that just might have contributed to NZ being caught off-guard by the March 15 rightwing extremist terrorist attack in Xchurch. Just saying.

I will simply end this anecdotal sidebar by noting that even if the US sports-military-industrial complex does not deliver ” victory” in recent times, in the days when I associated with them the special and covert operations communities, with much more limited and specific mandates, did a very good job at solving problems for the US when nothing else could.

And as far as I know none of those that I worked with back then were recruited via sports.

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Not all authoritarians are fascists.

A few days ago I responded to a post about Trump being a fascist on one of my friend’s social media page, then made a few comments on the consultancy social media page by way of follow up. Given the subsequent back and forth (including with regular KP reader Diane under her other social media moniker) I figured I might as well share my thoughts here. I realise that it may seem pedantic (it is) and inconsequential (it is not), but the misuse of value added terms is a trigger for me. So, with my political science/comparative politics hat on, let me offer some thoughts on the matter.

First, by way of prelude and backdrop to why I have decided to opine about this particular subject, let me explain something about analytic precision, specifically the notion of conceptual integrity. Conceptual transfer is an analytic tool where a concept is taken out of its original context in order to explain a different phenomenon that replicates the original meaning intact. The integrity of the original meaning is upheld in spite of the transfer. Say, a wheel back when is a wheel today even if its specific features are different. Conversely, conceptual stretching is a situation when a concept is stretched beyond its original meaning in order to describe a different, usually related but not the same, phenomenon. It loses explanatory and analytic integrity as it is stretched to explain something different. For example, when a hawk is called an eagle or an orca is called a killer whale. As an analytic tool the former is methodologically sound and intellectually honest. The latter is not. Conceptual integrity and precision is particularly important when using loaded or charged words, especially in contentious areas like politics.

There are plenty of authoritarians but only few were fascists or neo-fascists. There are Sultanistic regimes like those of the Arab oligarchies. There are theocracies like Iran (which used elections as a legitimating device). There one party regimes like the Belarus, PRC, DPRK, Syria and Cuba, one party dominant/limited contestation regimes like Algeria,Egypt, several of the K-stans, Hungary, Russia, Singapore, Tunisia, Turkey, Nicaragua and Venezuela and Egypt, military-bureaucratic regimes like those of the Sahel, and a variety of personalist and oligarchical leaders and regimes elsewhere. The way in which leadership is contested/selected and exercised, the balance between repression and ideological appeals in regime governing approaches, the mixture of inducements (carrots) and constraints (sticks) when it comes to specific key policy areas (say, in labor, tax, sexual preference and reproductive rights laws). There are many manifestations of the authoritarian phenomenon, so mislabeling some types as others compounds the practical and conceptual problems associated with the conceptual imprecision and confusion.

That is why it is unfortunate that Trump is being labeled a “fascist.” He clearly is a dictator wanna-be but fascism was a political movement specific to 20th century interwar Europe that combined charismatic leaders at the head of a mass mobilisational one party regimes with specific economic projects (state capitalist heavy industrialisation in the case of Nazi Germany) and state-controlled forms of interest group representation (state corporatism, to be specific). Fascist gain power via elections, then end them. Trump may lead the MAGA movement but he has no ideological project other than protectionist economics, diplomatic and military isolationism and nativist prejudice against assorted “others.” He prefers to manipulate rather than eliminate elections as a legitimating device. Barring an outright military takeover at this command, he will not be able to control the three branches of government even if he wants and tries to. He cannot control how interest groups are organised and represented unless he changes US laws governing interest representation and intermediation. Most fundamentally, he is just about himself, using tried and true scapegoating and fear-mongering in an opportunistic push to gain power. It worked once in 2016, so he is at it again, this time with a “better” (Project 2025) plan. That is scary but not fascist per se.

The closest he gets to a proper political category is national populist. As seen in the likes of Juan Peron in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico, these were charismatic leaders of mass mobilised movements as well, but who had different economic projects, different social bases (e.g. German Nazism and Franco’s fascist regime in Spain were middle class-based whereas Italian fascism and Argentine Peronism was urban working class-based and Mexican populism under Cardenas was peasantry-based), and who did not use warmongering to restore their nations to a position of global dominance (as did the European fascists). Trump’s base is low education working and lower middle class rubes encouraged by opportunistic business elites who self-interestedly see short-term benefit from supporting him. In other words, his supporters are the greedy leading the stupid.

It appears that respected people like Generals Milley and Kelly, who served in the Trump administration, are mistaken when they ever to him as a fascist. What they are describing is no more than garden party electoral authoritarians such as that of Viktor Urban or Recep Erdogan. Trump may admire despots like Putin, Kim and Xi, but he is a long way from being able to copy them, and none of them is a fascist in any event. Dictatorial ambition and authoritarian approaches come in many guises beyond the often misused term fascism. In fact, superstructural affinities like rhetorical style, corruption and bullying tendencies aside, Trump is less a fascist than he is a lesser moon in the authoritarian universe.

If I had to label him, I would say that Trump is a populist demagogue who has strong authoritarian ambitions such as purging the federal government of non-loyalists and persecuting his political opponents. Perhaps he will graduate into becoming a full-blown dictator. But what he is not is a fascist, at least not in the proper sense of the word. He is too ignorant to implement a modern variant of fascism in a place like the US, and there are too many institutional and social counters in the US to any move he may make in that direction. What I will admit is that he has neo-Nazis in his inner circle (Stephen Miller) and evil Machiavellians as his consiglieri (Steve Bannon, soon to be released from jail for contempt of Congress). Along with assorted lesser ogres equipped with the Project 2025 playbook, it is possible that they could turn the US political system into something resembling a modern variant of a national populist regime. But there is a ways to go before that happens.

I therefore feel that it is unfortunate and counterproductive to call him a fascist. It is like how he and his minions call Kamala Harris a “communist” or “socialist.” The labels are absurd and betray a profound ignorance of what those terms mean (and the differences between them), but they make for good red meat rallying points for a MAGA base that lacks the education or common sense to see the smear for what it is or the reality that communists and socialists do not get to hold the positions of California Attorney General, US Senator and Vice President (the closest they have come in recent times is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and he is no communist).

If the good generals and Vice President Harris decided to take a page out of his fear-mongering smear playbook by calling him a fascist, that may be understandable given the danger he poses for US democracy. But it is also dishonest (given Milley and Kelly’s educations, I find hard to believe that they do not know what fascism is and is not, but then again, many general grade officers major in military history, international relations and/or security studies rather than comparative political science and so may not be familiar with the proper definitions of the term. As for Harris, she is trained as a lawyer. Enough said).

Anyway, the point of this undoubtably boring exegesis is to get a pet peeve off of my chest, which is the resort to conceptual stretching in order to negatively frame narratives about political phenomena.