As a parenting advice column points out, unconstrained little boys like to blow things up.
Boys love explosions ... I'm not sure about girls and explosions. I suspect they're less enthusiastic.
Boys seem to have an inborn, visceral affection for explosions. As they mature, they gain the additional motivation of staging explosions to impress girls. I doubt girls are really impressed by this. But some of them might act impressed because they want to please boys. This only leads to more explosions. I'm guessing that the entire fireworks industry, and possibly war, has been built on this dynamic. ...We've given the keys to our military to an uninhibited toddler and his enablers. So we get murder on the high seas and in Caracas.
“The speed, the violence”
Trump’s refusal to try to get anyone on board [with his Venezuela adventure] is obviously an expression of contempt towards all people who are not his cronies. But it’s also an indication of Trump’s own fecklessness and confusion. He has not explained himself in part because he is not willing to do the work of understanding his or his country’s own motivations or interests. He’s going on impulse. And his impulses are for blowing things up.
Trump has long been praised by fools and opportunists as a non-interventionist, largely because he has long claimed, falsely, to have opposed the Iraq War. But even in his first term, it was clear he believes that war is a fun and exciting expression of power and masculinity (at least when it is waged against relatively weak foes). In his first 100 days in office, he used an enormous non-nuclear device — the “mother of all bombs” (MOAB) — in Afghanistan, then reacted with the same sort of gushing enthusiasm he showed after the Venezuela attack.
“We have the greatest military in the world, and they have done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and thatʼs what theyʼre doing, and frankly, thatʼs why theyʼve been so successful lately.”
In his second term, Trump has launched a constant series of military interventions. In addition to the murders in Venezuelan waters, he authorized strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer and threatened more intervention this week if Iran killed protestors. He’s also bombed Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.
These actions have all been framed — especially by [Trump's Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth — as triumphal expressions of American awesomeness and virility. Addressing military officers in September, Hegseth boasted that “we don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He denounced “politically correct” approaches to war and advocated instead “maximum lethality.”
... In short, Hegseth framed murdering people in defiance of the law as a moral and partisan goal.
Trump’s praise of “speed and violence” and Hegseth’s nattering about “maximum lethality” are of a piece with [19th century futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's] fascist embrace of war as “the world’s only hygiene” and with Hitler’s assertion that “mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.” Fascists don’t need a reason for this war or that war because they believe that war is a good in itself. Force is exciting and fun; using bombs and guns shows you’re strong. Trump’s a bully; he likes bullying.
... As political science professor Elizabeth Saunders said, “we have the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship” — and the dictator’s personal preference is to watch TV shows in which the US military blows things up at his whim. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, we’re about to find out.
I believe we are about to learn that the time is running out in which US enjoys impunity for the consequences of our toddler behavior.
In fact, Trump's enthusiasm for bolstering his waning potency by beating up our western hemisphere neighbors shows a dim apprehension of that fact even in the wily brain of the bully. He wants to cede the rest of the world to other bullies so he can enjoy a free hand closer to home. Bullying in this arena didn't actually work out very well for another Republican imitation cowboy -- that would be Ronald Reagan in his illegal interventions in Central America -- and it is not likely to work even that well for this petulant incompetent.
As is usual as a consequence of America's wars, we'll end up providing refuge to many of the best (and some of the worst) humans tossed about by our imperial pretensions. That's something to like about this country, I guess.
