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Once again, the "President of Peace" Donald Trump who, while running for office in 2016, announced that "regime change is a proven, absolute failure," has taken out after "the natives," eager to change regimes in distant lands. These days, of course, the country on which he's particularly focused is Iran, parts of which he's been blasting to smithereens. Last year, as Al-Jazeera reported, he managed to bomb (at least in passing) seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela. And now, of course, he's been battering Iran in an all-too-striking fashion. And if, leaving aside the modern technology of destruction involved, this reminds you of European powers and the United States dealing with those same "natives" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via what then passed for "gunboat diplomacy," no surprise there.
As he showed in Venezuela this year, capturing its president (and his wife) at the point of" well, not a sword, of course, but bombs and even a secret weapon he labeled "the Discombobulator," once he makes up his mind to be Donald Trump, president of the planet, nothing can stand in his way. (Or perhaps I mean that nothing can remain standing in his way.) And remember, we're not even a year and a half into his second term in office. So just imagine seven countries a year for almost three years to come and, while you're at it, try to imagine the planet we're likely to find ourselves on by then.
It should take your breath away. And while you're thinking about Donald Trump's urge to take us all into an airborne version of a distinctly colonial past in a particularly chaotic fashion, let TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the remarkable Informed Comment website, remind you of the role that White nationalism, an old favorite of colonial powers past, is once again playing in the Trump era in which so much that was old is new again. Sigh. Tom
"The Horror! The Horror!"
Colonial Nostalgia and Aryan Reliability
By Juan Cole
Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of White nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as "White," while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power. Typically (for our moment), Trump's recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct "civilizational decline" because of the European Union's commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that "Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product] -- down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today."
A Mayor Named Khan
As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is exemplified in Trump's National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today's dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn't that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as "shithole countries," has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe's share of global GDP.
In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe's supposed economic degradation doesn't bother him nearly as much as another issue: "This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure," thanks to Europe's migration policies. In short, Trump's government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming "migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife," along with "cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence."
Trump claims that he's no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington's "reliable allies." That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, "If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan."And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren't just coming from the Middle East, "they're coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo." In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump's Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Of course, he's completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe's future reliability, Trump has already said that he "can't trust" Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won't give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.
Aryan Reliability
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