The US under Trump is a global scourge
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News broke yesterday that the United States and Iran have reached some sort of agreement that may or may not end President Trump’s disastrous war.
Details remained scant as this newsletter was finalized Sunday evening, but significantly, Trump wasted no time moving the goalposts on when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen.
Trump, of course, has claimed to be on the verge of a peace deal dozens of times before, only to back away when he realizes that ending the war inevitably means admitting the US lost.
It’s notable that the administration has been very leery of revealing the actual details of the agreement to the public. But it appears to involve the United Arab Emirates unlocking billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, which is especially humiliating since Republicans have raged for more than a decade about the Obama administration releasing a measly $1.7 billion in Iranian assets to secure a nuclear agreement.
To add insult to injury, it’s unclear that Iran will commit to ending its nuclear program; it has agreed to continue to talk about it over the next 60 days, but nothing more. All Trump seems to really be getting is a pinky swear that the Strait of Hormuz will open at some point in the future — which was open before the war started, and which Iran can now close again whenever it’s threatened or wants concessions.
Iran’s victory has been a disaster for the US. The shuttering of the strait has pushed gas and fertilizer prices into the stratosphere and inflation hit a three-year high this month. US credibility globally has been shredded.
But the worst effects of Trump’s viciously erratic foreign policy have been born by those subjected to it overseas. Americans are, like everyone, mostly focused on their own worries — worries which now include a seemingly endless fascist assault on our liberty and lives. But the bloodiest and most painful costs of fascism are inflicted on the fascist’s neighbors, and when you’re talking about a global power like the US, “neighbors” here means “everyone on earth.”
Authoritarians disregard the voices and needs of their own people, but they are even less constrained when they deal with people that are not their own. If you want to see what Trump would like to do at home, you have only to look to the misery he has unleashed in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Africa. It’s a bleak and terrifying picture.
War crimes in Iran
Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran is itself an illegal war of aggression under international law. In addition, the war has been conducted with breathtaking disregard for the rules of war and little concern about civilian casualties.
The war began in February with a horrific bombing of an Iranian girls’ school. More than 160 people, most of them children, were killed. US officials have tacitly acknowledged American responsibility, though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump refuse to admit it publicly.
Experts estimate that Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran war as led to as many as 10,000 deaths and more than 48,500 injuries across the Middle East. These have mostly occurred in Iran and Lebanon, where Israel launched simultaneous (and ongoing) attacks.
Trump has sporadically promised much worse — in April, he blustered that Iran’s “civilization will die tonight” and again last week promised to (somehow) annex Iran’s entire oil industry. Even his ostensible announcement of a peace deal over the weekend included a threat to nuke the country.
These sweeping, often genocidal threats are in themselves a form of terror aimed at the civilian population. And while Trump has thankfully not dropped nuclear bombs, has continued to attack non-military targets. Last week for example he reportedly ordered strikes on two southern Iranian water storage facilities, attacks that likely constitute a war crime.
War crimes in South American waters
The evidence that military leaders ordered war crimes in Iran, and that troops carried out illegal orders, is disturbing. It is not, however, exactly surprising.
Since the fall of last year, the US has been carrying out unprovoked strikes on boats in South American and Caribbean waters. As of earlier this month, 200 people have been killed.
Trump claims these strikes are designed to prevent drug trafficking. But when you are shooting boats from the air, you are obviously not taking care to determine that the people you’re murdering are actually drug traffickers. And even if they are drug traffickers, international and US law does not allow for summary executions without trial. As Human Rights Watch explains, “the US boat strikes constitute extrajudicial killings — unlawful killings carried out by state authorities without any legal justification or process.”
The more information we get about the boat strikes, the more ugly and evil they are revealed to be. In the first strike in September, US personnel struck a ship, watched two survivors crawl desperately onto the foundering boat — and then struck them again, murdering them. Last week, The Intercept reported that according to a Pentagon official, those survivors, and the nine other people killed during the assault, may have been victims of human trafficking.
The strikes have done little to halt the flow of cocaine into America. They have underlined the fact, though, that US commanders are willing to order illegal war crimes, and that US soldiers are willing to obey those illegal orders. There will likely be more murders, since no one — not Congress, not the courts, not the military — seems willing or able to stop Trump from committing however many murders he wants.
USAID and Cuba
Trump’s shooting adventures are dramatic, illegal, and ugly. But he has done even more damage by demolishing US soft power might in other ways.
The first example here occurred at the beginning of Trump’s term. Trump allowed Elon Musk and his supposed efficiency experts at DOGE to illegally shut down USAID programs that provided nutrition and healthcare resources around the globe. By November of last year, experts estimated that the withdrawal of aid had already resulted in 600,000 deaths, of which 400,000 were children. That number is expected to balloon to 14 million dead if aid cuts are not reversed by 2030.
Not content with that stunning, genocidal death toll, Trump in February of this year launched a brutal fuel embargo against Cuba, which gets 60 percent of its oil from abroad. The US is hoping to overthrow the communist regime, but the results for the people of Cuba have been devastating.
Cuba was already in an economic crisis, but every shortage and hardship has been immeasurably exacerbated by the US, which has turned back oil tankers and threatened Cuban trading partners with sanctions, tariffs, and the freezing of assets. At least half of all international flights into and out of the island have been suspended for lack of fuel. Nationwide blackouts are common — which means crops can’t be harvested, there’s no way to get food to market, and no way to store it as refrigerators don’t work. Child malnutrition, almost eliminated in Cuba ten years ago, is spiking.
Medical infrastructure has been badly damaged too. Hospitals don’t have power; for some vital obstetric surgeries, nurses hold cell phones while doctors operate. Medicines are unavailable except on the black market, where only the wealthy can afford them. Vaccines for infants are delayed.
The entire island is experiencing a cascading series of crises, not all of which are caused by the US, but which the US is remorselessly exacerbating in the hopes that torment of men, women, children, and infants, will force the regime it hates from power.
“It’s the collective punishment of a population, particularly targeting the poor Black communities, pregnant women, children and the elderly,” journalist Ed Augustin told Democracy Now.
A danger to us and to the world
Trump’s use of US power to indiscriminately target and immiserate civilians has a huge range of potential downsides for Americans.
Experts worry that Iran War may lead to an increase in terrorism in the US — such as a shooting at Old Dominion University this March by a man with ties to Islamic State. Cuts to global disease control have made the US less safe; the recent screwworm infestation in Texas, for example, may have been caused in part by cuts to USAID, which funded screwworm detection and prevention at the US-Mexico border.
And when Trump pushes the military to follow illegal orders and accustoms them to participating in war crimes, the domestic threat is very clear.
Trump’s ICE security forces have already committed multiple extrajudicial killings that led to massive pushback and a public relations disaster for the GOP. But the steady murder of people in South American waters, and the targeting of Iranian and Cuban civilians, demonstrates that Trump remains enamored with the idea of using massive state terror to advance his aims. There’s little doubt that he would use the military against US civilians too if he could get away with it.
These are all very serious dangers; they are all, individually and collectively, reasons to impeach Trump and remove him from office if at all possible. But even these horrendous possible harms pale beside the actual carnage Trump has already accomplished abroad.
Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, vast swathes of Africa — the whole world waits to see who Trump will target next, and how many civilians he and his war-crime-drunk cabinet will murder in their next pointless, sadistic campaign.
That’s it for today
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I saw on MSNow this morning that Haberman and Swan’s book reveal that at least Trump Vance and Miller wanted to invoke the insurrection act in Minneapolis.😡 after Moscow Mitch gave him a
pass for Jan 6th. 🤬 “Do as I say… not as I did”.
They are all slugs. 😖
Speaking as an Australian I wouldn’t call the US a ‘scourge’ to the world. I’d reserve that for Putin’s russia who has actively and maliciously interfered with many other countries and deliberately caused hundreds perhaps thousands of civilian deaths through out and out terrorism by its armed serviceman.
What Trump has done is lowered the US from a widely respected super-power who was seen as generally a force for good in the world, to being now seen as a pretty stupid rogue elephant to be managed and worked around. The US pre Trump could perhaps be called the leader of the free world. It will never be called that again. For starters no one wants to follow it. The fact that Trump was actually elected twice means that it will never be trusted again as a long term reliable ally, as long as the GOP is seen as having a realistic chance of gaining power.
Trump has been a disaster and while he hasn’t brought the USA down to massive depths like Putin has with russia (the small r is a mark of my respect) in terms of the drop given where it was before he has to be ranked as one of the all-time most terrible and destructive leaders of a nation. He’s unquestionably the worst US President ever. The second worst doesn’t come even close.