Donald Trump Is Bringing the Imperial Wars to the Homefront

Paralleling the show of force in American cities has been a flexing of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. On Tuesday, the US military bombed a Venezuelan speedboat, allegedly carrying drugs, killing 11 on board. The White House has provided only the flimsiest legal rational for the bombing, which is likely in violation of internatiodnal law. Because of congressional surrender of war-making power to the imperial presidency, Trump has a wide variety of military resources he can deploy at will, including Special Forces, which have been used in the War on Terror to commit assassinations all over the world. Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been, as is their wont on all serious issues, silent about Trump’s threats to Venezuela.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that in 2019 Trump ordered a secret incursion into North Korea by Navy SEALs to plant a listening devise. The mission was botched and led to the killing of two or three civilians, fishermen whose only crime was being in the way of the SEALs. Trump never told Congress about this violent attack on a foreign country. The Biden administration revealed it to a few members of Congress in 2021, and the public is learning about it only now. Once again, the abdication of constitutional responsibility by Congress is enabling atrocities.

All these events—the troops in American cities, the attack on the Venezuelan boat, the failed North Korean mission—show a common pattern that can be seen Trump’s larger foreign policy. Unlike President George W. Bush, Trump does not seem to have an appetite for large wars pitting the American military against conventional foes and involving the holding of extensive territory. Rather, reverting to an older form of imperialism, Trump is a fan of quick commando raids and shows of force.

In 1898 John Hay, serving as secretary of state in the administration of William McKinley (one of Trump’s favorite presidents), described the Spanish American War as a “splendid little war.” Writing in The New Yorker in 1986, the foreign policy analyst William Pfaff offered an ironic gloss on Hay’s notorious phrase:

Wars can be both enjoyable and profitable, and the United States has found the wars it has conducted in Latin America to be, for the most part, both…. The intervention in the Dominican Republican in 1965, and the attack in Grenada more recently, provided for many Americans a reassuring contrast to the dismal and humiliating engagement in Vietnam.

But, as Pfaff goes on to note, these “splendid little wars” often have disastrous long-term consequences that are far more important than the brief jolt of jingoistic pleasure they initially deliver. The Spanish American War led to the United States making de facto colonies of Cuba and the Philippines, a dire story that still poisons its relations with those countries in different ways.

In his 1995 study In the Shadow of War, the historian Michael S. Sherry offers a similar analysis of how “splendid little wars” both serve to salve the wounded ego of the American elite while also unleashing short-term and long-term damage on the world. Sherry notes that in the 15 years after the fall of Saigon, “Presidents repeatedly put American forces in harm’s way—largely or wholly on their own initiative, despite the War Powers Act and Vietnam’s presumed lessons about obtaining national consent—but always in arenas on the periphery of great power conflict, where nuclear confrontation or serious conventional combat was unlikely, and where the stakes for the United States were limited, often largely symbolic.” These military interventions “revealed nostalgia for a presumably bygone era of American muscle, reluctance to employ that power in a serious way, and bewilderment about its utility.”

In light of the 30 years of history since Sherry wrote those words, we can see that the “splendid little war” has been the norm since 1975 with presidents of both parties willing to make occasional incursions into places such as Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Libya, and North Korea. The major anomaly has been George W. Bush’s decision to launch two large wars that required invasions and occupations that lasted many years.

Trump’s innovation is that he is applying the strategy of “splendid little wars” to the homeland. This too is a mark of an empire in decline: Finding it can’t subdue other nations, the government of the United States is trying its hand at domestic bullying. These new little wars are unlikely to be successful. An army that couldn’t defeat the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, and the Afghans is unlikely to cow the citizens of Chicago. The danger is that these splendid little wars can metastasize into big serious wars, including domestic strife turning into a civil war.