Trump’s Heathen Heart

Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional” shocked its readers in 1897, when he wrote it for the complacent celebrations of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. The poem read differently and more ominously after 1898, when Britain entered a wretchedly difficult and brutal three-year war in South Africa that shook imperial self-confidence as nothing had since the American Revolution.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth may have heard of Kipling, although it is doubtful that they have read him or any other versifier. But his words apply to them no less:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Naked imperialism is an ugly thing, and that contemptuous phrase, “lesser breeds without the Law,” unsettles any contemporary reader of “Recessional.” But for all of its ugliness, the poem also captured Kipling’s belief that imperial power was transitory, and that when exercised for nothing but ruthless self-interest, it was not only foolish, but dangerous and impious. George Orwell, whose opinion of Kipling was mixed (he called him a “good bad poet”), believed that by “lesser breeds without the Law” Kipling meant the Germans, and that the poem as a whole was “a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German.”

The American president has admitted that he has an addictive personality, which is why, to his credit, he is a teetotaler. But he and his aides are undoubtedly intoxicated with military power. “This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American-military might and competence in American history,” he said at the press conference following the seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. “No other country on planet Earth, and it’s not even close, could pull this kind of operation off,” Hegseth added. “And no other president has ever shown this kind of leadership, courage, and resolve. The most powerful combination the world has ever seen.” And Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller later told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “what we’ve witnessed under President Trump’s leadership this last week is one of the greatest foreign-policy and military victories this country has ever had.”

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The Maduro snatch was, unquestionably, a remarkable feat of arms, and no tears need be shed about the removal of a man who was an enemy of the United States, a troublemaker in the region, and a tyrant at home. It is entirely conceivable that the outcome will be beneficial, leading to the eviction of Cuban and Iranian agents from Venezuela, much-increased pressure on the Cuban dictatorship, and even, by an unforeseen chain of events, some relief from oppression for the people of Venezuela.

The concerning thing is not Maduro’s removal, but rather the view of military power that Trump, Hegseth, and others seem to be forming. Hegseth boasted, understandably, that there were no American fatalities. There were, however, plenty of Venezuelan casualties and, according to Havana, 32 Cuban intelligence and military operatives killed. The administration’s expensively trained lawyers, high on credentials if low on scruples, may call this a law-enforcement operation, but blowing up buildings, shutting down Caracas’s electrical grid, and killing lots of uniformed people is about as warlike as it gets. And judging by what they later said, Trump and his lieutenants reveled in the combat they observed from the luxurious setting of Mar-a-Lago.

Commando raids of this type, and the units that execute them, fascinate politicians. The people are extraordinary, their actions spectacularly skilled, the hazards immense, and the immediate political payoffs great—if the raids succeed. Small wonder that the Trump White House put out its own Mar-a-Lago version of the famous Obama-administration picture of the president and his top advisers keenly watching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In that case, as in this one, there was precisely nothing the president and his entourage could do to affect the outcome, but it made them look like they were in charge—which, once the bullets began to fly, they were not.

Something similar holds true in limited air campaigns. Bombing offers gratification without commitment, a thing akin to the dating patterns of dissolute men, of whom the administration also has a few. These are ways of war that seem clean, limited, precise, and brief.

And so they are until they are not. The Trump administration no doubt thinks, as the Obama administration did, that by fighting this way, it can avoid getting bogged down in the kinds of counterinsurgency campaigns that the U.S. waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The result in Barack Obama’s case was the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from Iraq—and then a new commitment to fight a deeply destructive third Iraq war against a resurgent Islamic State, and a 2011 intervention in Libya that opened the way to chaos spreading far beyond Tripoli and Benghazi.

The Trump administration also believes—a lesson, again, learned from Democratic presidents, such as Bill Clinton and Obama—that one can avoid consulting Congress before ordering U.S. forces to begin killing people. The Yugoslav wars and the Libya interventions were not preceded by authorizations of military force from Congress, unlike operations in either Afghanistan or Iraq conducted by the George W. Bush administration.

This is all dangerous stuff. Avoiding the deployment of 100,000 troops into Venezuela is no guarantee that American military action will not continue and expand, whether in response to terror counterpunches; attempts to break a de facto, if limited, blockade of Venezuela; or mere refusal to cooperate with the president’s desire to cop the profits from Venezuelan oil sales. In war, one thing leads to another.

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Hubris is one of this administration’s deepest weaknesses, as is its predilection for bombast and chest-thumping. In a White House that insists on public sycophancy (and no doubt gets a full dose in private, too), the resulting chances of a misjudgment are considerable. Worse is the deliberate disconnection of the use of force from any kind of moral purpose. Miller gave the game away in his CNN interview. Americans, he said, must be “able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,” before decrying “this whole period that happened after World War II, where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging and engaging these mass reparations schemes.”

Think about that. The United States should acknowledge no restraints, whether of law or morality, on what it does, and the policies that got us through the Cold War, the institutions we created, and the norms we asserted—unevenly, even hypocritically at times—were all for suckers. It is not surprising that Trump and his subordinates immediately began threatening a host of countries, including two of our allies, Colombia and Denmark.

Their statements, and others like them, are nothing less than a paean to force, applied when and as the United States sees fit, unconstrained by anything other than presidential whim. The situation is unlikely to end well.

Or as Kipling concluded:

For heathen heart that puts her trust
   In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!