Opinion

The Flaw, Fatal To Liberty, In Trump’s Anti-Terror Ideology

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Alan Keyes Former Assistant Secretary of State
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When it comes to Donald Trump’s campaign, the devil is in the contradictions.  He makes statements that, taken by themselves, rouse enthusiastic applause from this or that segment of his audience.  But like the typical politician, who says one thing to one group in one part of the room, and something quite contradictory to another group in another part of the room, the different punch lines Mr. Trump uses to provoke applause add up to a doubtful result.

So in his recent speech outlining his anti-terrorism approach, he says of G.W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq in 2004 “…I have been clear for a long time that we should not have gone in.”  Non-interventionist fans of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan hear those words and jump to their feet applauding.  But Trump then says that “…I have been just as clear in saying what a catastrophic mistake Hillary Clinton and President Obama made with the reckless way in which they pulled out.  After we had made those hard-fought sacrifices and gains, we would never have made such a sudden withdrawal—on a timetable advertised to our enemies.”

Since he acknowledges that the intervention achieved “gains”, does Mr. Trump thus tacitly admit that his opposition to the invasion of Iraq was a mistake?  A bit later in the speech he complains because others didn’t listen to him when he “was saying constantly and to whomever would listen: keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil… don’t let someone else get it.  If they had listened to me then we would have had the economic benefits of the oil, which I wanted to use to help take care of the wounded soldiers and families of those who died—thousands of lives would have been saved.” In setting the context for this report he says “If we had controlled the oil, we could have prevented the rise of ISIS in Iraq by cutting off a major source of funding, and through the presence of U.S. forces necessary to safeguard the oil and other vital infrastructure.”

I wonder if the non-interventionists are still applauding at this point.  Suddenly it seems that Mr. Trump saw very important possible gains from the invasion of Iraq, consisting mainly in the control of the country’s oil resources.  To hold on to those gains he envisages keeping what amounts to a permanent occupation force in Iraq. Far from being non-interventionist, this is a bold embrace of self-interested imperialism, precisely the sort of ambition forever being ascribed the United States by its enemies. Included among them, of course, are the Radical Islamists Mr. Trump boisterously promises to make the first focal point of America’s international policy.

As if to make sure our enemies can make the most of this declaration of imperialistic intent, Mr. Trump celebrates the fact that “This proposal, by its very nature, would have left soldiers in place to guard our assets.  In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils.”  This was pointedly never our declared policy in the aftermath of WWII or the Korean war.  And we have nations in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including countries that were our enemies and continue to be our competitors, flourishing in proof that our intent was not merely self-serving exploitation.

The last time the United States openly applied the imperialistic understanding Mr. Trump proposes to implement was in the aftermath of our victory over Spain at the turn of the last century—old days to be sure, though not generally regarded as good ones for American principle.  In keeping with the premises of non-aggression, self-determination and self-government that we sought to encourage in in the world after the Great Wars of the 20th century, in Iraq we focused on the challenge of working with the Iraqi people to move their country toward a constitution of government that would respect their sovereignty and assure peace among themselves and with their neighbors.

Apparently Mr. Trump proposes to replace this deeply flawed “nation building” approach with an openly imperialistic approach that would permit our enemies to portray our every effort to forge alliances against Radial Islamist terrorism as a deceitful ploy in the service of our imperialistic ambitions.  As applied in the Middle East and North Africa, the “nation-building” approach was seriously flawed.  It had the same flaw that has bedeviled institutions like the UN, set up to mimic institutions of representative, constitutional self-government like our own, but which included states and nations that rejected and opposed the principles of right and rights those institutions are supposed to implement.

Such were the states and nations that embraced left and right wing totalitarian socialism in the 20th century.  But they also included states and nations informed by tenets of Islam that are plainly incompatible with the premises of God-endowed right and rights. Those are the premises that inform the character, laws and practices required to sustain constitutional regimes deriving their just powers from the people’s common and mutual consent to do right.

In his speech, Mr. Trump correctly identifies the strategic consequence of this flaw when it comes to the war against the Jihadi terrorist threat.  In that war we cannot properly identify the enemy without developing and apply an ideological test.  But stringing together a list of their egregious offenses (“the oppression of women, gays and people of different faith…women murdered by their relatives for dressing, marrying or acting in a way that violates fundamentalist teachings…honor killings…) is not a sufficient basis for developing such a test.

For example, are efforts currently under way in the United States to enforce acceptance of homosexuality by judicial fiat, or laws restricting the open expression of religious views opposed to homosexual practices, ideologically acceptable or ideologically offensive?  Are countries like Israel, or Uganda that base aspects of law on religious tenets ideologically offensive?  Are they correct who argue that any recognition of the male-female sexual difference is an ideological offense, including legal definitions of marriage as exclusively between a male and a female?

Listening to his speech, most of his self-professed Christian supporters may have applauded Mr. Trump’s denunciation of Islamic intolerance.  They may have applauded the fact that his ideological test “will reject bigotry and oppression in all its forms”, and that it would prevent immigration to the United States by people “who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred.” But given the pointed inclusion of homosexuals (gays) in the list of the victims of bigotry and hatred, does this mean that countries, or even states of the United States, that respect the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” with respect to human sexuality will be disparaged for practicing “bigotry and hatred”, and treated as contributors to anti-gay acts of violence or discrimination?

How does Mr. Trump’s proposal for “extreme vetting” on an ideological basis differ from the imposition of “political correctness” many of his supported believe he opposes?  When Mr. Trump refers to “our values”, and the “spirit of Americanism”, is it enough that he specifically defines this in terms of opposition to Radical Islam, even though his general rhetoric encompasses all opposition to all “bigotry and hatred”?

As was true in the speech he gave when he accepted the GOP nomination, Mr. Trump makes no mention in this latest speech of the American creed, articulated in the American Declaration of Independence, that was the basis for the movement to end slavery in the United States; the movement to implement full and equal citizen rights for women; and the movement to end law enforced racial segregation and discrimination throughout our nation.  Mr. Trump relies on a de facto ideology, subject to no transcendent principle of right and rights, and disciplined by no logic that respects that principle. It is, therefore, subject to the arbitrary whims, predilections and ambitions or of whatever forces happen to control some branch of government.

We can better understand the deficiencies and consequences of this de facto ideological approach If we reflect for a moment on Mr. Trump’s praise of the “old days”, when nation’s predicated their authority to rule on the so-called “rights of conquest” supposedly entailed by decisive victory in war.  Such rights amount to ruling by the prerogatives of power, an approach that Marx and other such thinkers built into a pseudo-scientific theory of “History” in which the supremacy of material forces was the ultimate rubric of legitimacy in human affairs.  Peel away their rhetorical pose of concern for the downtrodden masses, and such historicism is indistinguishable from the premise that “might makes right”.

This ancient nostrum mostly benefitted the rule of the elitist few, with occasional exceptions in the form of democratic majority tyrannies.  The latter were prone to despoil envied or despised minorities of their possessions, as well as their lives and dignity.  America’s Founders avowed an understanding of right and justice that rejected this power worshipping view.  They looked to the authority of the Creator, God as the source of lawful governmental authority in human affairs.  They specifically asserted that human beings, as they are equally responsible to do right according to God’s will, are equally in the right as and when they carry out that responsibility.

This concordance between right and responsibility establishes the standard by which the just powers of government are distinguished from unjust abuses of power. Just governments are those instituted by people committed to respecting that standard, using constitutions established to constrain the power of government so that it acts within the bounds of respect for justice.  But Mr. Trump’s reference to the spoils of victory resonates with the power mongering ideologies that produced the oppressive right and left wing totalitarian socialist regimes that proliferated in the 20th century.  Though opposition to what he calls Radical Islamist Terrorism is the excuse, the end result (and likely aim) of the de facto ideological administrative regime he proposes to establish is the development of an apparatus of totalitarian, ideological control.

This would produce an institutional revolution in the mission of our military, intelligence and police forces.  In consequence, they would be ready for use in eviscerating the God-endowed rights of the American people.  This is the way our liberty ends.  And Donald Trump is a likely demagogue, who shows exactly the character and disposition required to bring it about.  Tragically, the very people who profess to fear for liberty the most will be the ones who vote his demagoguery into office.

Of course, the election of Hilary Clinton will achieve the same result, though with a greater show of opposition as she does so.  Neither of these dueling demagogues offers a way to preserve America’s liberty.  To blaze that path, we must reject them both. And we must do it in a way that signifies our rejection of the anti-American elitist faction sham both of them actually serve.