If Trump ever did decide to escalate from blowing up the occasional fishing boat to a full-scale assault on Venezuela, what would that look like? And how might other new wars launched by Trump elsewhere in the world be fought?
A hint came when the president indulged in a little historical revisionism about America’s wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. He said:
Problem with Vietnam, we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would have won easy. We would have won Afghanistan easy, would have won every war easy. But we got politically correct. “Ah, let’s take it easy.” We’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand. We win. Now, we win. We don’t want to be politically correct anymore.
Got that? Trump’s implying that the problem with the war in Afghanistan was that US tactics were too restrained in the interests of optics.
Over the course of the longest war in American history, the people of Afghanistan had been terrorized by everything from cluster-bombing to house-to-house raids to arbitrary detention and torture to drone strikes on wedding parties. By the time President Joe Biden finally withdrew US forces in 2021, twenty years of brutalization by the US occupiers had so deeply alienated the population that the government we’d been propping up literally couldn’t survive for a week without US backing. American soldiers were still being taken to the airport when the government fell.
The war was not only a failure but was marked by innumerable atrocities. US soldiers were well known to use racist and dehumanizing language when describing Afghan civilians — “hajis,” “towelheads” and even “sand ni***rs” — making it easier to kill them without remorse. But Trump thinks the problem was that we were just too “politically correct” about war tactics in Afghanistan.
Over the course of the war in Vietnam, the United States dropped an estimated 388,000 tons of napalm, which literally burns its victims alive, on North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”) guerrillas in South Vietnam hid out in jungles, so there was a conscious and explicit attempt to destroy those hiding places with Agent Orange and other defoliants, causing generations of birth defects. Entire villages were routinely destroyed so guerrillas wouldn’t find food and shelter there, with their inhabitants herded against their will to “strategic hamlets.”
When Richard Nixon decided to expand the war by invading Cambodia, his instructions to the Air Force, infamously relayed by his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to his deputy Alexander Haig in a recorded call, were, “Anything that flies on anything that moves.” After a trip decades later, the late Anthony Bourdain said that, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”