Some have warned that Trump has so much to gain from an atmosphere of heightened fear and confusion, and such a blatant disregard for the truth, that we should expect this administration to cook up its own crises. While it would be unwise to put anything past this constellation of characters, the fact is that nefarious conspiracies may well be unnecessary. After all, Trump’s reckless and incompetent approach to governance is nothing short of a disaster-creation machine.
Take the administration’s incendiary public statements and policies relating to Muslims and “radical Islamic terrorism.” A decade and a half into the so-called war on terror, it’s not controversial to state the obvious: these kinds of actions and rhetoric make violent responses distinctly more likely. These days, the people warning about this danger most forcefully are not antiracism or antiwar activists, but leading figures in the military and intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment. They argue that any perception that the United States is at war with Islam as a faith and Muslims as a group is a gift to extremists looking to rationalize bloody attacks on American soldiers and civilians. Daniel L. Bynam, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served on the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, puts it this way: “Trump’s actions and rhetoric add credibility to the jihadists’ narrative of civilizational war.”
Already, ISIS reportedly described Trump’s first anti-Muslim-travel executive order as a “blessed ban” that will help to recruit fighters. Iran’s foreign minister warned the ban was “a gift to extremists.” Even Trump’s own national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, has described Trump’s repeated use of the term “radical Islamic terrorism” as unhelpful because, he says, the terrorists are “un-Islamic.” Yet nothing has changed. Trump seems determined to do everything possible to reinforce the holy war message.
The idea that Trump doesn’t realize how provocative he’s being rings about as hollow as his claims of being unaware that his racist rhetoric has generated a climate ripe for hate crimes.
The Shock of War
The most lethal way that governments overreact to terrorist attacks is by exploiting the atmosphere of fear to embark on a full-blown foreign war. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the target has no connection to the original terror attacks. Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and it was invaded anyway.
Trump’s likeliest targets are mostly in the Middle East, and they include (but are by no means limited to) the following: Syria; Yemen, where Trump has already increased the number of drone strikes; Iraq, where deadly strikes with high civilian casualties are also on the rise; and, most perilously, Iran. And then, of course, there’s North Korea. Already, after visiting the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, Secretary of State Tillerson declared “all options are on the table,” pointedly refusing to rule out a preemptive military strike in response to the North Korean regime’s missile testing. This was followed by Trump’s muscle-flexing announcement of the immediate deployment of a US Navy strike group, including two destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, to the Korean Peninsula (embarrassingly for the administration, the carrier was photographed thousands of miles away, heading in the opposite direction for joint exercises with the Australian Navy). And it was all underlined by a testosterone-fueled tweet from Trump about how, if China doesn’t step in, “we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” North Korean state media, meanwhile, issued a hair-raising declaration that the country was prepared to launch a nuclear attack “in the US mainland.”
Trump has openly called for a new nuclear “arms race”—a call we have not heard since the 1980s. He has reportedly asked his foreign policy advisers repeatedly why the United States can’t just use nuclear weapons, seemingly not grasping the principle of retaliation. And one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, Sheldon Adelson, has talked about needing to threaten Iran with a nuclear strike in the “middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul…maybe a couple of rattlesnakes…. Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business.’?” Adelson donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, the largest donation of its kind ever.
I am not saying a nuclear war is likely. But in Trump’s very short time in office, there has already been a level of military escalation that is both chilling and bizarrely haphazard. As indicated by his early deployment of the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB—Trump is drunk on the allure of showing the world he’s top dog. Which is why Mikhail Gorbachev, who worked toward disarmament when he was Soviet leader, wrote in Time magazine that today “the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.” (And that was before Trump upped the ante with North Korea.)
There are many reasons why people around Trump, particularly the many who came straight from the defense sector, might decide that further military escalation is in order. As we saw, Trump’s April 2017 missile strike on Syria—ordered without congressional approval and therefore illegal according to some experts—won him the most positive news coverage of his presidency, with liberal hawks fawning over him as enthusiastically as his superfans on Fox. His inner circle, meanwhile, immediately pointed to the attacks as proof that there was nothing untoward going on between the White House and Russia. “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie,” Trump’s 33-year-old son Eric told the Daily Telegraph (perhaps inadvertently revealing that there might have been more than sympathy for “beautiful babies” behind the decision to stage such a dramatic strike).
Exxon’s Wars
There is another reason why this administration might rush to exploit a security crisis to start a new war or escalate an ongoing conflict: there is no faster or more effective way to drive up the price of oil, especially if the violence interferes with oil supplies making it to the world market.