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Elon Musk aside (and even when it comes to him, who knows for how long), Donald Trump really has no friends. For him, everything and everyone is just so much property. You're either his or you're ready for the trash heap of history. For him, everyone (except him, of course) is in some sense deportable. And that's true not just locally but globally. Canada is a mere "51st state"; Greenland, a hunk of icy minerals that's obviously his property; Ukraine, yet more minerals of his and nothing else that matters; Gaza, a future Trumpian "Riviera of the Middle East" without its population; the European Union, "formed to screw the United States."
Certainly, any American who isn't Trump White is Trump Trash. And the rest of the world, White or not, is largely yet more trash, a planet to be tariffed to hell and back and, if that turns out to hurt Americans, too, well, why the hell should he give a damn?
There's one man (and only one) who matters on Planet Earth and, as far as he's concerned, no one's ever going to get rid of him! (A third term as president, you bet! A fourth term, undoubtedly! A fifth, well, why not, since he's also -- don't doubt it for a second -- the Forever Man.) All in all, give him credit. He's truly proven to be a one-two-(three?)-of-a-kind president. There's never been anything quite like him. And yet, believe it or not, whatever he might imagine, Donald Trump does live in the same world as the rest of us and what he does affects us all, not to speak of the state of (and fate of) the United States.
Back in 2010, TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy predicted that a far-right populist would take the White House in 2025 (yes, 2025!), demanding ultimate respect for America and that the country's world leadership would, in fact, end in silence. Now, 15 years later, he's exploring the shape of that silence, or put another way, welcome to Fortress America and the unsettled and unnerving planet that goes with it. Tom
Fortress America
Trump's Tricontinental Vision for a New World Order
By Alfred McCoy
Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party's memorably grim slogans, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery." But for me, the most disturbing image of all -- and I first read the book in high school -- was the "Two Minutes Hate," aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens.
Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, "a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic." As those moments of hate continued, what appeared was "the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched out of their seats."
Finally, as "row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces" swam up to the screen" and brought those two minutes of Hate to their terrifying climax, the face of Big Brother appeared "full of power and mysterious calm," prompting spectators to shout, "My Saviour!," and to break into "a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B!" B-B!' -- over and over."
For, as Orwell explained, those people of Oceania were "at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia." Officially, "Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia," which "represented absolute evil." Yet through some quirk of memory, the novel's hero Winston "well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia."
That was, in some fashion, Orwell's ultimate horror: a world divided into three great continental blocs, with humanity held in thrall to omnipotent leaders like Big Brother through endless wars against an ever-changing enemy. Even though he published 1984 nearly 80 years ago in 1948, just two years before he died, more than three quarters of a century later, in the age of President Donald Trump, his fictional fantasy is fast becoming an unsettling simulacrum of our current geopolitical reality and that couldn't be eerier (at least to me).
A Tricontinental Strategy
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring forth almost daily from the Trump White House, the overall design of his de facto geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising speed. Instead of maintaining mutual-security alliances like NATO, President Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself -- with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling, in a version of fortress America, all of North America (including, of course, the Panama Canal). Reflecting what his defense secretary called a "loathing of European freeloading" and his administration's visceral disdain for the European Union, Trump is pursuing that tricontinental strategy at the expense of the traditional trans-Atlantic alliance, embodied by NATO, that has been the foundation for American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.
Trump's desire for ultimate continental hegemony lends a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise seemingly off-the-wall, quixotic overtures to claim Greenland as part of the United States, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada "the 51st state." On his sixth day in office, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, "I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we're going to have it." He then added, "I don't know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn't allow that to happen because it's for protection of the free world." After Vice President J.D. Vance made a flying visit to a remote U.S. military base in Greenland and claimed its people "ultimately will partner with the United States," Trump insisted that he would never take military force "off the table" when it came to claiming the largest island on this planet.
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