For the past few years, U.S. President Donald Trump has been astonishingly portrayed as a prominent anti-war figure within the domestic political discourse of the empire, as he has repeatedly claimed that, unlike his predecessors, he never started a new war during his first administration. And his supporters seem to have embraced this claim, which, in their eyes, represented a bitter irony that it was really their opponents who, though always styled themselves as the peacemakers, have been the true warmongers. Trump appeared somewhat different to his supporters, as he was ostensibly the enemy of the mysterious “establishment.”
It is worth noting that the ”anti-establishment” rhetoric, like much else in contemporary politics, has been hijacked by the public relations machinery surrounding the second administration of Trump. Despite the rather obvious fact that Trump’s circle consists precisely of those working tirelessly to “establish” their absolute rule over the entire world, the emperor continues to posture as the voice of the voiceless, as it were, not hesitating to present himself as the enemy of the establishment, even as his goals and methods remain indistinguishable from those whom he claims to oppose. The recent revival of the infamous U.S. “war on terrorism” serves as the perfect example of this contradiction.
Trump’s idol, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, launched the first war on terrorism long before 9/11. In 1984, he declared that “a very worrisome and alarming new kind of terrorism” had developed, identifying it with “the direct use of instruments of terror by foreign states.” His preferred term was “state terrorism” – a term that has been in wide use since then. The description was certainly instructive: state terrorism was terrorism by “foreign states” by definition, and this excluded the United States itself from ever entering the list of states who would participate in it. One important advantage of this was especially remarkable: whoever questioned the policy risked being labeled a terrorist sympathizer.
Was it not the same with former U.S. President George W. Bush’s iteration of the war on terrorism? After 9/11, he announced that “the world has come together to fight a new and different war,” which, in his words, was “a war against all those who seek to export terror, and a war against those governments that support or shelter them.” Once again, Reagan’s notion of “state terrorism” was back in play, this time with the added dimension of divine justification – Bush claimed to be “driven with a mission from God” to destroy Iraq.
Fed up with the endless wars, Republican voters imagined that Trump would break the cycle and bring an end to this catastrophic exercise. No more wars, neither on terrorism nor on anything else. And he promised to uphold free speech, too, suggesting that people would be free to voice their discontent with their government’s foreign adventures, for example. Yet, recent developments have vindicated the skeptics who always doubted Trump’s supposed anti-war stance. Today, the U.S. is involved in yet another war on terrorism in Yemen.
The third war on terrorism, like the earlier versions, has already started to have its effects on the domestic affairs of the empire. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University who was involved in the anti-genocide protests, was detained without any legal charge for his alleged support for terrorism. He was labeled a terrorist sympathizer who, for this reason, could no longer have freedom of speech, just like “state sponsors of terrorism” could have no right to peace.
The pattern is unmistakable. Each war on terrorism begins with banal declarations and ends with expanded authority, its targets shifting as needed, and its rationale flexible enough to accommodate new enemies. Whether in the mountains of Yemen or on the campus of Columbia University, the logic remains the same: Those who resist must be subdued, and those who question must be silenced. Trump’s promise to break the cycle has proven no more credible than those before him. The machinery grinds on, impervious to the particular rhetoric of any one emperor. And so, the question is not whether this war will end but only when the next one will begin and under whose name.
