Unpolicing the world

Donald Trump claims to be the law-and-order president of the United States. There does not seem much sign of this as the stitching of the Republic gets undone.

Protesters have been given a considerable roughing up across several states; police forces are in retreat before proposals of defunding while protocols for arrests are being changed. Police chiefs are resigning and, in the rarest of cases, officers are being charged for police brutality.

What, then, of the empire’s own policing capabilities overseas? Here, the Trump message is a treat of confusion. He wishes to be armed for unilateralism. No more needless policing endeavours in the international arena. No unnecessary use of US armed forces to intervene in the murky, squalid affairs of international relations.

The interventionist, policing streak in foreign policy reached its height with the 2005 declaration by President George W Bush in his second inaugural address that it was “the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

This was ambitiously dangerous, foolhardy and a promise of a global US chokehold to be applied to any regime suspect of not sighing to the sirens of liberty. (Well, at least the US variant of it.) “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

President Barack Obama was not much of an improvement on this doctrine of permanent revolution: the US had to continue remaining the sheriff of exceptionalism, a protector of “dignity”. In a speech to West Pointers at a military academy commencement ceremony in May 2014, he acknowledged the old warning of George Washington “against foreign entanglements that do not touch directly on our security or economic wellbeing” and the interventionists’ assertion “that we ignore these conflicts at our own peril”.

He preferred a middle way hardly different from his predecessors. The US could not be isolationist; history had imposed upon the Republic solemn burdens. There was “a real stake, an abiding self-interest, in making sure our children and our grandchildren grow up in a world where schoolgirls are not kidnapped and where individuals are not slaughtered because of tribe or faith or political belief.”

Trump’s language, at least on the subject of meddling in the name of liberty, or policing a form of international morality, seem unsentimental and alien to this strand of thought.

On June 13, in an address to the US Military Academy at a West Point graduation ceremony, he proclaimed, or more appropriately reiterated, his task of “ending the era of endless wars.” He preferred “a renewed, clear-eyed focus on defending America’s vital interests.”

Excerpted from: 'Trump at West Point: Un-Policing the World'.

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