Trump’s sudden heart
Yesterday’s analysis piece by Mark Landler in the New York Times is an example of the media coverage that President Trump’s strike on Syria has received in the last 48 hours.
Here’s a bit of what he said: “Donald J. Trump has always taken pride in his readiness to act on instinct, whether in real estate or reality television. On Thursday, an emotional President Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, ordering a retaliatory missile strike on Syria for its latest chemical weapons attack. In a dizzying series of days, he upended a foreign policy doctrine based on putting America first and avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands.
“Mr. Trump’s advisers framed his decision in the dry language of international norms and strategic deterrence. In truth, it was an emotional act by a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his — and that turning away, to him, was not an option.” It goes on to quote Trump about “beautiful babies” and the Secretary of State about Trump’s unwillingness to “turn a blind eye.”
The man has done more than turn a blind eye to those beautiful babies. He has aggressively and proudly sought to exclude them. He’s whipped crowds into a frenzy promising to do so. And his insistence that we ban refugees from Syria didn’t even make the article.
Trump built the entire rationale for his presidency on a ruthless commitment to nationalism and discrimination — demonizing anyone who did not and doesn’t meet his definition of American at home, treating women with disdain, crowing about all manner of disrespect, and warning against international military engagement. Yes, he has always been erratic and lacked any moral compass or worldview. We should expect this inconsistency on an ongoing basis.
It’s appropriate and necessary to call out the “dizzying” shift in his stance on Syria. Chemical attacks and the deaths of children in Syria have been going on for years, and Trump repeatedly argued against intervention under identical circumstances. (Identical other than an urgent need to look less beholden to Russia than Obama did, that is.)
But it’s a broken, ugly thing that we’ve picked now to begin moralizing and to allow Trump to moralize. The president has chosen to reflect on our common humanity only as a reason to launch missiles. That’s dangerous and frightening. It seems human life is valuable in other parts of the world only when we threaten to take it.
I’m not a pacifist, and I’m a confessed hypocrite on foreign policy. I value the lives and comfort of Americans over those of my global neighbors. I have to answer for that and wrestle with that. But we’re not claiming self-preservation here. The Department of Defense’s justification is that the missile strikes were “a proportional response to Assad’s heinous act…intended to deter the regime from using chemical weapons again” in the region.
I’m not a national security expert, either. Heinous is an understatement. I don’t know what it would take to stop Assad from murdering children, and, like pretty much everybody, I struggle with the question of when America should get involved in foreign atrocities. Kosovo worked well; Somalia didn’t.
Geopolitically, perhaps Trump was right to harass and threaten Assad by firing at that airbase. But we aren’t making national security arguments here. We’re making excuses. We’re using the “heart” of a corrupt, cruel, emotionally unhealthy president to explain away military action. That military action would have to be expanded tremendously — in terms of American lives, dollars, and political capital — in order to have any positive impact in Syria. And it could just as likely lead to further chaos instead.
We had and have an opportunity and duty to relieve Syrian people’s suffering. And it doesn’t necessarily require military intervention. We can accept refugees from Syria and other desperate regions of the world, and we can provide appropriate humanitarian aid. It might not be sufficient, but it is right.
President Trump is ignoring that opportunity and doing his level best to shirk that duty. Too many in the media are giving him the cover to do so by discussing his sudden heart for “children of God” around the world.
