The Hot Screen admits to mixed feelings of validation and fear at having joked last week about Trump liking to blow shit up, after the cruise missile strike against Syria but BEFORE the dropping of the largest conventional bomb in the history of civilization on an ISIS complex in Afghanistan. Trump has demurred as to whether he ordered the bomb into action, but it’s obvious that either a direct order or assent to an idea presented to him led to this ostentatious display of old-school firepower. Peter Bergen has an article at the CNN website titled "Why 'the Mother of All Bombs' and Why Now?", which seeks logical explanations, such as a need to address the deteriorating war against the Taliban in Afghanistan; but we feel the answer lies as much in the irrational, ignorant, and violent impulses of the commander in chief as much as any conscious strategy. We've said it before as an ironic question and we’ll double down now by just saying it straight: Trump obviously likes to blow shit up, whether it’s our democracy or ISIS fighters. This is not a man with a subtle grasp of power: bigger is surely always better in his mind.
It’s never reassuring to hear a weapon described as “the largest non-nuclear ordinance” in the U.S. armory, with its suggestion of brushing up against the lower end of the spectrum of nuclear terror. We even find its MOAB (for Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb) acronym mildly freaky, with its unnecessary biblical connotations and association with barren Utah landscapes. And isn’t it all a little too Saddam-Hussein-in-Uncle-Sam-drag to be calling this the “mother of all bombs”?
But as unsettling as all the telling verbiage that surrounds talk of the bomb are the actual circumstances of its use. Sixteen years after the initial U.S. invasion to root out al-Qaeda and depose the Taliban, the U.S. is still in Afghanistan fighting against. . . al-Qaeda and the Taliban, PLUS, of course, ISIS. Likely among other things, the MOAB drop was meant to signal toughness and resolve in the fight — but the pure symbolism of the act is only accentuated by the ghastly tonnage of the explosion. One bomb, after all, is not going to win the fight, in part because it’s not at all clear that the U.S. military, elected officials, and foreign policy professionals really understand WHY we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, or what victory might look like.
Afghanistan is a country that has been at war in one form or another for going on 40 years straight; its territory and populace have been pummeled and eviscerated by countless bombs. This makes us think of this single MOAB drop being as much a sign of pointless and redundant violence as anything else, a signal that Trump and his military advisors still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there’s a military solution to the endless Afghan fight.
In fact, on three fronts this past week, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that Donald Trump is getting pretty jacked up about superficially simple military solutions to complicated foreign policy issues. From Tomahawks aimed at Syria, to big momma MOAB, and then over to North Korea, against whose further nuclear testing the U.S. has indicated it may respond militarily. Of the three conflicts, North Korea is by far the scariest. As discussed previously, there are many ways that things can get very, very bloody extremely quickly in North Korea. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in foreign affairs to grasp that two militaristic mentalities with irreconcilable needs (the U.S. asserting that North Korea cannot have nuclear weapons, North Korea feeling the threat from the U.S. as its ultimate reason for wanting them) aren’t necessarily going to end up at a peaceful resolution.
And so thrust into our faces in increasing doses every day is the greatest danger that a Trump administration has always presented to our country: that this embarrassment of a president might get us into a war. We never imagined that the possibility would be upon us so quickly; it seems a symptom of Trump’s overall incompetence, that having failed so quickly on the domestic front he is turning to distractions abroad, where a president can act with far less constraint than in domestic politics.
To be fair, we did sort of see this coming, what with all the generals Trump has named to security posts, and his own basic belligerence, ignorance, and lust for power. Recall that Defense Secretary Mattis needed once-every-half-century approval from the Senate to fill that post so soon after being on active duty — a small but troubling augury of the impending hyper-militarization of American foreign policy under this president. And there is a good case to be made that it is not simply Trump’s personality, but his lack of his own vision for foreign policy coupled with an assertive Pentagon and a lack of typical civilian controls, that is helping drive military over diplomatic solutions. And the context of the American war on terror can't be overstated: tragically, this country has grown accustomed over the past 15 years to a permanent state of war, so that increased militarization under Trump might seem like a matter of degrees rather than a full departure from what came before.
What worries us at this nerve-wracking moment is that a sense of ironic distance, denial, and fatalism seems to have overcome the body politic. Even as people express their fear, we don’t have a sense that they REALLY think Trump will get us into a war. Certainly you are not seeing the mass demonstrations that might have been expected warning Trump off his belligerence in Syria and North Korea. In fact, polls have shown that a majority of Americans supported the missile strikes against Syria, and it is a depressing but real possibility that support in that one arena is emboldening Trump to consider force in the much more dangerous conflict with North Korea.
Is a basic non sequitur preventing us from fully grasping the danger we collectively face — that it feels incomprehensible that someone as absurd as this president could be the end of us all, or at least the end of an often nasty but relatively robust international order? And yet, with his early embrace of destabilizing global violence, it sometimes feels as if we've unwittingly chosen the form of our destruction: Donald Trump, our country's very own Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
