The Platform of the MAGA GOP: Isolationism and Retribution

The Platform of the MAGA GOP: Isolationism and Retribution

Repealing Democracy, Fast and Furious

Unlike Europe, the United States is a large nation where most people live far from an international border. We’ve never been very good at foreign policy, often having been forced into global wars by extrinsic events. Pearl Harbor put a quick stop to the rise of Nazi sympathizers and isolationists and pulled us into WWII. The fear of being surrounded by anti-American communist countries, evidenced by Castro’s takeover of Cuba and the missile crisis of 1962, directly led to our involvement in Vietnam… where communism was next in line to rule. Threats to the precious supply of oil – where any oil field catastrophe can explode the cost of petroleum products everywhere – pulled us into the Gulf War as Iraq invaded Kuwait. It took a direct terrorist attack on 9/11/2001 against the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in NYC to mire us in our nation’s longest military conflict.

While we protected oil reserves in the Middle East (other than Iran), after WWII, the United States has not won a single major war since. Despite being a nation of immigrants, America’s land mass isolation, noted above, has allowed large constituents of voters to believe that “we don’t need anybody else; we can do everything on our own.” The notion of fighting and protecting nations far from our shores has led many Americans to believe that we could and should be an island of self-sufficiency. Even our educational system, where many states have elevated religious indoctrination above secular historical reality, science, mathematics and economics, only serves to enhance our ignorance of the world as it really is… and how we fit into it.

When foreign realities create cost-price squeezes on American consumers, the blame often goes to “immigrants,” foreign terrorists and “radical democrats” even at there is a direct and very measurable villain of another sort: overseas malign enemies hell-bent on our destruction and marginalization. They hate that our currency is still the major reserve currency on earth (the denomination of most international trade pricing), that our SWIFT/BIC codes are the mainstay of interbank transfers and currency exchanges, that our Navy has pledged to maintain free shipping lanes (which governs everything from the export of soybeans and commercial aircraft to our import of bananas and well-priced consumer goods), and that our military umbrellas – from NATO to individual treaties with nations like Japan, South Korea and the Philippines – give those nations reasons to support Americans wherever they are.

But America’s ability to protect our industries, our safety and our prosperity, by maintaining our traditional economic and military treaties, is now challenged by an autocrat who measures success by loyalty to him and commercial balance sheets, has no love for representative democracy, where non-white Christian nationalists must be excluded from any possibility of constitutional majority, and feels safer in a world of dictators. He tells us that the mutual defense pledge under NATO’s Article 5, the alliance's backbone, is no longer a mandate if his perception of the balance sheet – which he calls a one-way burden mostly on us. Yet Article 5 has only been invoked once, after the September 11 attacks, which led the alliance into Afghanistan.

The United States has been the only NATO nation ever to be directly benefited by a call on Article 5! While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not an Article 5 action, it does represent a unified commitment by NATO to contain those powers who believe they can usurp our military and economic supremacy and redefine global values to favor and prioritize their desired hegemony over the entire planet. For us, fighting a war far from our shores to protect our domestic advantage is an opportunity, not a burden.

Isolationism creates military and domestic weakness; retribution leads to internal violence, even civil war. We will pay more for just about everything, reduce our revenues from exports dramatically, if Russia, China, North Korea and Iran continue to build military capacity well beyond that of the United States and its allies and are able successfully to back rebels who are on their side. They are smiling ear-to-ear not only as the United States sits on the sidelines but as internal pollical polarization strikes at the very heart of America’s ability to continue as a superpower with a super economy. As Michael Gordon, writing for the February 25th Wall Street Journal points out, we are unraveling ourselves and enhancing the power of those who wish to accelerate our demise:

“At a NATO summit in July 2023 in Lithuania, Biden vowed that the U.S. military support would continue ‘for as long as it takes.’… But with House Republicans digging in their heels on additional Ukraine assistance, Biden used a different phrase to describe the American commitment when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House five months later. The U.S., Biden said, would supply Ukraine with vital military aid ‘as long as we can.’

“Looking back, some security analysts say that Biden should have moved more quickly to supply critical weapons systems to Kyiv, before the Russian military had time to adapt and to ensure that the arms were in Ukraine’s hands before the patience of U.S. lawmakers began to run thin… A modest number of ATACMS surface to surface missiles, for example, weren’t provided to Ukraine until October 2023, well after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began to falter. And the weapons U.S. sent were the shorter-range variant, which has a range of about 100 miles, and not the longer-range model that has the capability to strike targets more than 180 miles away, including in Crimea.

“‘This was a policy that was carried out in a very incremental way due to escalatory concerns and concerns about Ukrainians’ not being able to use the kit,’ said Alina Polyakova, president and chief executive officer of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think tank that supports Ukraine. ‘If we had moved faster and weren’t as worried about Russian reaction, I think this conflict could have ended in the first year before the Russians adapted.’… A senior Biden administration official said that, in making weapons decisions, the White House needed to take into account the Ukrainian military’s ability to absorb new equipment as well as Putin’s proclivity for rattling the nuclear saber…

“The broader question is whether the resistance of some House Republicans to continued military support for Ukraine and the popular support for Trump’s America First policy reflect a seismic shift away from the alliance policies in Europe that Biden has long embraced… ‘The point isn’t we want to abandon Europe,’ Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio), a staunch Trump supporter, told a security conference in Munich earlier this month. ‘The point is we need to focus as a country on East Asia, and we need our European allies to step up in Europe.’

“Some European equipment has been crucial for Ukraine’s military effort, including Britain’s Storm Shadow cruise missile and Germany’s Iris T missile-defense system. There are more German tanks in Ukraine than U.S. ones, and European self-propelled howitzers have been important for the battle… But the continent, which is still struggling to overcome weaknesses in its defense industrial base, wouldn’t be able to cover the shortfall if the U.S. supply of artillery shells, air defense interceptors and other key weapon systems isn’t quickly resumed, a deficiency Western analysts say Russia would move to exploit.” Ukraine is as important as East Asia!

America is becoming a paper tiger, unwilling to honor its commitments made over decades of Democratic and Republican administrations, if MAGA voices rise to control this nation. If you think life is expensive now, if you wish we had countered climate change earlier and more aggressively, life under a MAGA-platform of governance will bring levels of political and economic misery reminiscent of the Great Depression and our Civil War… with added doses of increasingly intense and destructive climate change disasters.

I’m Peter Dekom, and self-aggrandizing autocracy governed by ignorance and conspiracy theories is the major threat to each and every American’s quality of life.