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The United States helped create the pre-condition for Trump by continually
spreading the idea that it's OK to ally ourselves with leaders who abuse
their subjects. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP/REX Shutterstock)
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It's Too Late to Worry About 'Normalizing' Trump. Decades of Policy Did That
for Him
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 March 18
The current president is just too stupid to be embarrassed about things his
predecessors all did, too
Max Boot, the noted Washington Post columnist, and "Jeane Kilpatrick senior
fellow for National Security Studies" at the Council for Foreign Relations,
thinks Donald Trump is betraying American values by meeting with Kim
Jong-Un.
Such a meeting, Boot says, would mean "giving the worst human-rights abuser
on the planet what he most wants: international legitimacy."
Let's unpack that one for a minute. We're worried now about giving human
rights abusers legitimacy?
The idea that we don't legitimize human-rights abusers is a laugh-out-loud
joke everywhere outside America. You could fill a book chapter with the
history of the friendly relations between American presidents and just the
foreign dictators who are credibly reported to have eaten other human
beings.
Here's a cheery letter from Gerald Ford inviting Central African Republic
dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa (the remains of 30 people were found in his
crocodile pond upon ouster) to Washington.
We helped install Idi Amin, too. He later denied rumors of cannibalism,
saying human flesh was "too salty," but he had other equally upsetting
hobbies. We've supported a couple of generations of Nguemas in Equatorial
Guinea, both of whom uncle Macias and nephew Teodoro Obiang reportedly
ate their political enemies.
This is in addition to the countless Batistas and Suhartos and Diems and
Marcoses and Pinochets who were just murdering thieving monsters we
legitimized not by sitting down with them at the negotiating table, but by
making them allies we showered with things like arms and money.
The problem with Trump is that he's too stupid to be embarrassed by such
relationships. He constantly makes all of Washington look bad by jumping too
enthusiastically in bed with the blood-soaked juntas and anti-democratic
governments we more quietly embraced in the past.
Over the weekend, for instance, Trump horrified progressives when he called
for the death penalty for drug dealers, an idea he said he got from Chinese
President Xi Jinping. "I don't know if this country's ready for it," Trump
moaned.
This is monstrous, of course, and God help us if we actually try to enact
this policy.
But the fact that we're so tight with repressive China to begin with is on
Trump's predecessors, who should have taken a harder line on human rights
issues a long time ago.
For decades, American officials in both parties have overlooked China's
horrific record on human rights. Both continually lobbied for China to keep
receiving Most Favored Nation status and other trade benefits, largely
because corporate donors wanted it.
The real measuring stick we use when it comes to determining whether a
foreign regime is irredeemably monstrous or an important ally is whether the
leaders we're talking about are our bastards, or their own bastards
puppets, or free-lancers.
Dictators who take the throne with our backing get weapons and cash. The
ones who do it without our backing usually find themselves getting a nice
healthy dose of regime change sooner or later.
Sometimes the offender starts out as an American lapdog only to leave the
kennel and instantly become a Dangerous International Human Rights Offender.
Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll until 1988, but later became
disobedient and found himself holed up in a nunnery listening to invading
American troops blaring "I Fought the Law" (the Clash version, in a nice
detail) as they waited for him to surrender.
Saddam Hussein was another friend-turned-target, as was Diem and a few
others. The line between friend and pariah in our foreign policy is
incredibly slim. It really has nothing to do with anything beyond the
political utility, to America, of the regime in question.
This is why the debate over Trump meeting with Kim Jong-Un is so absurd. The
crime here isn't meeting with a dictator we snuggle up to worse creeps all
the time the crime is meeting with an out of pocket dictator.
Rachel Maddow last week struggled to articulate why she was so opposed to
negotiations with North Korea. Her basic take seemed to be "Nobody has ever
met with the dictator of North Korea, therefore nobody should ever meet with
the dictator of North Korea."
A lot of self-described progressives seem to be agreeing with her. This is
interesting, since the same idea was incredibly popular among the same
audience not long ago.
On July 23rd, 2007, at the Citadel in South Carolina, Democratic
presidential candidates held the first presidential debate of the 2008
election cycle. In it, an audience member asked if candidates would be
willing to meet with leaders of countries like Syria, Iran, and North Korea.
"I would," Obama said. "And the reason is this: the notion that somehow not
talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding
diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration, is ridiculous."
As a colleague pointed out to me over the weekend, this was one of the
moments that first endeared progressives to Barack Obama, precisely because
it defied bipartisan Washington consensus. True to form, after that debate,
both Hillary Clinton and George Bush ("Some seem to think we should
negotiate with terrorists and radicals") ripped Obama's naiveté.
The idea that the United States does not negotiate in public until the enemy
has already surrendered in private has long been a bedrock principle in D.C.
It's one of the reasons why people in other countries hate us so much. It's
also why our "peace proposals" so often read like ultimatums.
A classic example was the Rambouillet deal presented to Slobodan Milosevic.
Milosevic agreed to the key principle of an independent Kosovo, but didn't
want the deal secured by NATO troops, as outlined. He preferred the
occupying troops fly under a U.N. or an OSCE flag. We told him to take the
deal or be bombed.
He wouldn't budge, we bombed him, and our news media consistently
misreported this war-starting sequence of events. The New York Times went so
far as to say Milosevic "absolutely refused to entertain an outside force in
Kosovo."
The current consensus on North Korea is basically the same. It's said
repeatedly we shouldn't countenance a meet with the mad dictator until the
mad dictator agrees in advance to surrender. Doing anything else makes us
look weak, and gives a PR win to a murderous autocrat. And we wouldn't want
that!
The flamboyant horribleness of Trump is allowing warmongering,
democracy-hating hacks on both sides of the aisle to rewrite history.
They're penning a new creation story that dates America's embrace of
murderous dictators to Trump's election.
"Another morning in America," sighed Paul Krugman, after Trump invited
Egypt's ruthless Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Washington last year, and called
him a "fantastic guy." Politico chimed in: "Critics worry the president has
a love for tyrants and little interest in promoting human rights and
democracy."
What these people left out of their outrage is that we'd been supplying Sisi
with jets and missiles since the Obama years. As The Intercept pointed out,
exactly the same thing happened when Trump and Tillerson cozied up to the
repressive Bahrain regime (who began receiving arms from us in 2015).
One of the constant themes we hear on social media and from pundits is that
the press has to go the extra mile to avoid "normalizing" Donald Trump. The
problem is that when it comes to embracing autocratic regimes, Trump
actually is normal. We should be ashamed not just of him, but of the decades
of votes we cast for politicians who did the same things.
We helped create the pre-condition for Trump by continually spreading the
idea that it's OK to ally ourselves with leaders who abuse their subjects
who push dissenters out of airplanes, electrocute their genitals, bomb women
and children, and so on so long as our economic interests are protected.
I would love to be able to point a finger at Donald Trump and say, "The
United States does not sit down with murderous dictators!"
But we can't say that, can we? Not with a straight face, anyway.
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