President-Elect Trump is loading his cabinet with Generals and Admirals. The obvious question should, therefore, be: is Donald Trump preparing for war?
Trump’s foreign policy has been all over the place. He would “bomb the hell out of” ISIL, or maybe he’s a 1930s-style isolationist?
In any case, going forward Trump will need to find a way to fulfill his campaign promise of bringing back steel, coal, and manufacturing jobs to America. There’s only one way to do that: war.
Simple protectionism would destroy the economy. Manufacturing has been fleeing China for Vietnam because China isn’t willing to pay their workers so little. Are we going to pay less than China is willing? Subsidies would go against the tide of history and only be a short-term fix, besides that McConnell’s Republicans seem to be against spending on much of anything.
What would work, though? A good old-fashioned war!
We like to produce our own weapons, so there we go. That brings us coal, steel, and manufacturing. Suddenly Trump has managed to fulfill all his campaign promises.
But we hate war, don’t we? We’re tired of it.
That’s not quite true. We’re tired of wars that we can’t win. We’re tired of endless wars. We love wars that we can pick off a quick victory for. Thatcher’s war in the Falklands didn’t quite work out from a PR perspective, but the idea was right.
Where would we go to war, then? We can’t just declare a war randomly without an appropriate target.
The obvious choices are, a) Yemen, b) Eritrea, and c) Libya.
The first step in going to war is always establishing a false cause. This is what Rome would do during its heyday. They would identify a target for war, then wait for the slightest justification before going. That way Rome was never a conquering empire, simply a just state doing what it must.
Creating a cause is easy enough in all three of these places. In Yemen, we already have ground forces supporting combat operations. In fact, more U.S. troops arrived just this week. All the enemy combatants have to do is blow up a tank and that’s more than enough cause. Besides that we’re supporting a local ally, so we can say that we were called in.
In Eritrea, we would be liberating an oppressed people from a totalitarian state. What’s a better cause than that? We would assert the support of the U.N. (even if they don’t give it), which has declared that the State has committed “crimes against humanity.”
Finally, Libya. Libya remains in a state of chaos ever since 2011, with the war and violence ongoing. We could easily go in there claiming to be cleaning up the mess that Obama left for us.
This is all not to mention that Trump could just commit fully to Syria. We could ally ourselves with Russia and switch our support to Assad.
Launching a quick, successful war would fulfill all of Trump’s domestic economic promises and would continue to build up the sense of nationalism and strength that he has been nurturing. What other choice does he have?