(To the right, the author in Vietnam in 1971)
I was an anti-war protester in college who ended up getting drafted and serving as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam. Burned out with protesting and not wanting to flee to Canada, I was a guy from a blue-collar family without a deferment, like so many of the soldiers who ended up in Vietnam.
As a former political activist, however, I couldn’t help from appreciating the irony in a poster I spotted on or near my base in Plantation, South Vietnam, a handful of miles north of Saigon. It was 1971, and Nguyen Van Thieu was running for re-election as president of the “Republic” of Vietnam. The poster encouraged voters to cast their ballots for a man who’d been in charge since 1965.
Only problem was he had no opposition. It was a one-man race. Thieu was the only choice South Vietnamese voters had.
The point today is that the United States had no problem sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers like me to fight for an authoritarian regime that was anything but a republic or a democracy. Thieu had been a turncoat supporter of the French colonialists before he became a puppet for the Americans.
This is important in light of the recent U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife on unproven claims that they are tyrannical drug lords. The U.S. government has no problem with dictators or even drug lords so long as they don’t interfere with the flow of U.S. capital or nationalize industries that once belonged to powerful U.S. corporations.
In fact, on December 1, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker.
Like his predecessors, President Donald Trump, who campaigned as a “peace” candidate sick of endless wars such as those fought by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become enthralled in the chess game that is international politics. He has threatened another war against Iran and a takeover of Greenland, proposed building a money-making seaside resort in bombed-out Gaza in league with his ethnic cleanser friends in Israel, and rattled his sword at China and occasionally even Russia despite his amateurish efforts to end the war in Ukraine. He has ordered bombing in Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Syria.
Trump won re-election because voters thought he was going to save them from the “Bidenomics” that had failed to quell inflation or resolve the growing housing issue. A year into his new term he seems to have lost interest in domestic economic issues, and yet, like his predecessor Joe Biden, claims life is so much better in today’s America.
The housing crisis? Price of eggs and inflation in general? Health care? Who cares?
What’s different about Trump from his predecessors is that he doesn’t sugarcoat his imperialistic motives. He blatantly says he’ll “run” Venezuela in the wake of Maduro’s kidnapping. He claims Venezuelan oil reserves as U.S. oil reserves. He says Greenland should be under U.S. control regardless of Denmark’s claims or what that means to the basic premises or future of NATO’s existence. He lies about why he kidnapped Maduro but he doesn’t couch his motives in talk of “democracy” or “human rights” like so many previous U.S. leaders.
His disregard—actually contempt—of his allies in Europe and the rest of the Western world is on full display. As seen in Trump’s year-long struggle to find peace in Ukraine, European leaders themselves have proven they care little about peace or even democracy. They give their blind support to war in Ukraine even though its leader, Volodymir Zelensky, runs an authoritarian regime that allows no opposition. They actually care little about Ukraine. Their sole aim is to keep the United States on board as their protector and benefactor.
Europe’s decline as a Western model of democracy and good government is painful for this writer, a former resident of Germany and son of a German mother and an American father who fought for Europe’s freedom against tyranny in World War II. Today’s Europe veers toward being unrecognizable under its incompetent leadership and with the growing presence of migrants who are as autocratic and anti-democracy as the countries they fled.
From far away, Russia and China watch as Trump bullies his way across the continents and as Europe falls ever deeper into irrelevance. They are powers that bullies like Trump are wary to confront directly, and they are led by seasoned leaders who understand the chess game Trump treats as checkers. When will they say, “Enough is enough”?
I left Vietnam a year or two before the ultimate disaster, when U.S. helicopters full of fleeing Vietnamese and Americans scrambled to lift themselves from Saigon’s rooftops to escape the ignominy of utter defeat.
Maybe Trump should have not avoided the draft and spent a little time in Vietnam himself. Already in Venezuela, militias and underground forces are gathering to oppose Trump’s plans for their country. The Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro is alive and well. Like Vietnam, Venezuela has plenty of jungles and mountains where its revolutionaries can hide and launch attacks and mount a potentially long, disastrous war, the kind of war Trump campaigned against.
