Political liberals sook about Trump not being aggressive enough
You might think it’s good that World War Three didn’t break out this week after the Singapore summit between US president Donald Trump and North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un. Not so, according to a swathe of liberal opinion-makers disappointed that Trump didn’t give Kim a bloody nose.
From the New York Times to the Guardian, from US Democratic Party Senate leader Chuck Schumer to Australian Greens leader Richard di Natale, they attacked Trump for being played for a fool. Their case is that the US got nothing and North Korea swept the board. In their view, Trump helped to normalise a brutal dictator and failed to confront the threat to peace posed by Kim’s nukes.
But this telling of events gets everything the wrong way about. The biggest danger to peace on the Korean peninsula is not the North’s small stock of weapons, but the United States’ huge arsenal stationed in the region, which it has regularly demonstrated an enthusiasm to use.
The “crazed nuclear madman” is not Kim, whose behaviour is rational from the perspective of a weak nation under siege, but Trump, who has repeatedly threatened the North with annihilation. The main danger presented by the summit was not that Kim would refuse to denuclearise, but that a frustrated Trump would board Air Force One and press the nuclear button. That this did not happen is the reason tens of millions of North and South Koreans are breathing easier.
By putting North Korea in the crosshairs, liberals whitewash the role of the United States. Everything they accuse Kim of doing, and more, has been done by the US.
Torture? Look at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Brutal prisons and prisoners of conscience? One in three African Americans is in prison, on probation or on parole. Thousands of Muslim Americans are jailed for thought crimes.
Executions? US states have killed nearly 1,500 citizens since capital punishment was reintroduced in 1977. Thousands more have been murdered with impunity by law enforcement agents.
Repressing political opponents? Ask the families of murdered Black Panthers. Ask Panther members still in prison. Ask members and supporters of the American Indian Movement about the frame-ups and assassinations.
Supporting terrorism? The US committed two of the greatest acts of state terrorism in history – the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq. And it enables Saudi Arabia and Israel to destroy civilian lives in the Middle East.
Denying freedom of movement? Undocumented families being torn apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers could only dream of such a thing.
Liberals point out that Kim starves his own people. The US knows all about that, since it helped destroy North Korea in the 1950s during three years of war and has since overseen crippling sanctions. (The US could give lessons on starving people: 40 million citizens live in food-insecure households, according to the Department of Agriculture, in a country where the federal government pays farmers to destroy crops.)
Liberals say that Trump was foolish for telling the media that the North Korean leader “loves his people” and that he should have told North Koreans that the US supports their struggle for freedom. But the US has been the main enemy of freedom for decades. Its claim to be “the leader of the free world” is a sick joke to millions who have suffered under its yoke – from the Monroe doctrine in Latin America and the military slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century, to the repeated invasions and occupations costing millions of lives in Asia and the Middle East.
The liberals criticise Trump for allowing Kim to pose as a respectable leader. They demand that Kim be forced to bow and scrape like a beggar.
The problem that lies at the core of the liberal critique of Trump’s performance in Singapore is that it assumes the US is a force for good in the world – that it bears the “white man’s burden” of civilising uncivilised peoples.
The president’s critics charge Trump with sacrificing this noble mission to vanity and greed – the chance to make a real estate deal. Wrapping themselves in the stars and stripes, they attack Trump for undermining US imperialism, which Martin Luther King called “the biggest purveyor of violence in the world”.
Trump “got nothing” out of his summit with Kim not because he was weak or vain or greedy. The choice Trump faced, and any US president now faces, is to recognise North Korea as a nuclear power or risk confrontation. North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear warhead development has changed decades of US strategic planning in East Asia. And with China’s potential entry on the side of the North, confrontation might quickly spin out of control.
The summit outcome was a setback for US imperialism. But the US having less room to throw its weight around in East Asia should be welcomed by those who want peace in the region. That liberals in the US and Australia are concerned about this demonstrates that they care less about whether Koreans win the right to live in peace than they do about the prestige of the US empire.
