Trump Commander-in-Chief

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang.

Donald Trump will have his own war, like every U.S. president before him despite lack of reasons, for a conventional or nuclear war.

Soldiers used to go to war because they believed there was something tangible to die for, something historians called nationhood.  The nation state or your country provided you with jobs, which made it possible for you to provide for the family’s education and a comfortable home.

Countries do not provide that carpet anymore, the carpet that makes people proud that they are Americans, British or Canadians.  Instead, they passed laws that make it possible to send jobs off shore, where workers earn $50 a week.  There are even tax incentives for making their citizens jobless.

If governments are enemies of their own citizens, how can citizens fly to far off lands to die for them?  Is the enemy within, or outside the nation state?  If citizens are asked to die for an ideology, do service men and women in uniform even know what ideology is?

President Trump will have his own ideology.  He might follow U.S. war tradition and protect free South Korea from communist North Korea.  Americans will die in such a war but he will never relax  immigration requirements and grant instant citizenship to South Koreans.  That is how ideological wars work.

One thing for sure, his wars won’t be in Europe, Australia or New Zealand because people who look like him live there.  It will probably be in the Middle East or Asia and other geographical areas with people that do not look like the Make America Great Again voters.

Nuclear weapons make conventional wars obsolete, but there is still fighting on the ground.  Going to foreign countries with enemies that don’t look like you and do not believe in your religion needs more than dropping off U.S. Marines with packets of cigarettes.  It is about fumbling in the dark because you do not know the language necessary to locate and kill the enemy.

U.S. veterans know better.  They lost arms and legs in Vietnam because of it.  They don’t talk about it because it invokes painful memories.  Maybe they do, but nobody is listening.  Saddam Hussein died in Iraq because the enemy penetrated the language barrier that killed him, but what was the gain?  The world is still paying for his death and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya’s death. 

You don’t know the enemy’s language, you have lost the war already. It is something America doesn’t think about because of the belief that the U.S. is invincible, a myth destroyed by 9/11.  It is something to think about before President Trump tweets a Third World War.

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.