Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Mainstream punditry on the verbal clash between President Trump and Vice President Vance with Ukraine’s Zelensky over the business-political terms to end the U.S. proxy war with Russia bears a critical look. Consider David Brooks of the New York Times on the PBS Newshour.
The volatile exchange before news media between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky “nauseated” Brooks. He contextualizes that White House spat in the modern history of American foreign policy.
(Magical thinking alert.) “We’re a flawed country,” according to him. “We make mistakes (in Iraq, Vietnam), but it’s usually out of stupidity, naiveté, and arrogance, not because we’re ill-intentioned.”
Brooks delivers a usable past, a mythology that is, I suggest, MAGA-lite. As writers such as Noam Chomsky, Joyce Kolko, Samir Amin and Edward Herman have shown, the driving forces of American foreign policy are financial and industrial interests. Their motive is to begin or continue the political and social conditions to ensure a return on investment.
To this end, financial and industrial interests demand and receive armed government assistance for the social conditions to extract resources and exploit labor. “Stupidity, naiveté, and arrogance,” are not part of this foreign policy, contrary to what Brooks says. The intention of corporations is profit maximization.
Take the U.S.-backed coup against the Guatemalan government in 1954. Land reform, popular there, was bad news for the United Fruit Company. The corporation lobbied Uncle Sam to counter this policy option for the Guatemalan majority and got a CIA-backed armed overthrow of the government, replacing it with a business-friendly military dictatorship.
Expanding the capital-labor relationship that requires state violence to enforce is the norm for U.S. foreign policy. Systemically, capitalist interests direct foreign policy. “Stupidity, naiveté, and arrogance” as motives are off track.
To be clear, Trump and Vance are bullies. Watching them try to verbally pound on Zelensky is ugly. Watching him parry this duo is satisfying at a certain level. There is a kind of David and Goliath dynamic at play. I get that.
Let’s be real about choosing sides, though. What does a business-military alliance between the political leaders of the U.S. and Ukraine do, materially, for the American working class and its cost-of-living (food, health care and rent) crisis? What is the benefit to federal workers fired and facing layoffs from backing Zelensky over Trump and Vance? Will such workers be more able to feed and house their families by allying themselves with Ukraine’s political leader?
What of Social Security recipients looking at the impacts of Elon Musk’s DOGE wrecking ball? Its digital destruction mission caused former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley to forecast a “system collapse and an interruption of benefits…within the next 30 to 90 days.” In 2023, 71.6 million Americans received Social Security benefits, according to the Social Security Administration. To say there will be if his forecast proves true widespread pain and suffering across the U.S. is an understatement.
What is the benefit for Uncle Sam to arm Ukraine, now on a pause from Trump, to recipients of Medicaid, half of whom are kids? There are 72 million Americans who receive Medicaid, and they are staring at deep spending cuts that will doom scores of them, including children with disabilities, to unhealthy lives. If denying Medicaid to vulnerable Americans makes the nation great, we need a new definition of greatness.
Where in our moment of political chaos is the material benefit from war spending to Americans on the bottom and in the middle? The Trump administration has announced it plans to end the jobs of 80,000 Americans employed with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Guess what that move will do to the health and well-being of veterans while a U.S. foreign policy of war and waste rolls on toward a war with China, as its economy surpasses America’s. Trump’s hike of tariffs (taxes) on Chinese imports to the U.S. are a reaction to this systemic change, one that will increase the prices of such foreign goods for American consumers. Shoppers at the People’s Republic of Walmart Inc. stateside beware!
Unpacking the Oval Office spat last Friday as a departure from U.S. foreign policy misses the mark. Trump and Vance merely say the quiet part of might makes right, the language of the schoolyard bullies, out loud. Democrats prefer to talk left and walk right. America’s working class has no dog in this fight.
U.S. foreign policy benefits entrenched domestic financial and industrial interests, wrapped in MAGA rhetoric currently, following the Democratic Party’s reign of lesser evil-ism. At the end of the day, genocide is genocide. For instance, 47 has resumed supplying Israel with 2,000-pound bombs to drop on Palestinian civilians. He is pro-war, like his predecessor in the Oval Office. This is a Biden-to-Trump continuity.
According to the late Gore Vidal, one of my favorite American writers, the U.S. has one political party with two right wings that fund war spending. That financial and industrial structure has zero to do with “stupidity, naiveté, and arrogance,” which is Brooks’ view.
Source: Counter Punch
