Donald Trump’s exceeded my worst expectations. Australia should reconsider its US alliance
In the last days of 1990, a few months after Saddam Hussein invaded KuwaitI sat on a sunny terrace overlooking the sparkling waters of the Persian Gulf in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, once again transformed into a battlefield.
The upcoming lunch was extravagant: the host for whom I was interviewing Wall StreetJournalHe was a senior Emirati government official. I asked him whether Gulf countries would contribute force to efforts to oust the Iraqis.
“You think I want to send my teenage son to die for Kuwait?” he replied and then chuckled. “We have white slaves coming from America to do this.”
I almost choked on my lobster claw. This was a recorded interview and the quote appeared directly in the newspaper.
That’s when I remembered that conversation reports emerged Last week, Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman was pressuring Trump to send US ground forces to Iran. This was reportedly the only way to ensure that the region would not be left unstable, helpless, unpredictable, and with an even more radicalized Iran.
Like all governments except Trump and Netanyahu, the Saudis did not want this war. But what they want even less is a TACO move (Trump is Always Afraid) by a president who realizes he has disastrously miscalculated Iran’s prowess and cunning and watches his already dismal approval ratings plummet along with the world’s economies. He had made the perfect decision to declare war. He or she might make an equally incompetent decision to declare “mission accomplished” and leave a nasty mess. This was something that suited the president.
But Saudi Arabia has one of the best-funded and equipped militaries in the world, with more than a quarter of a million active-duty soldiers. Learning from the example of Kuwait in the 1990s, the UAE has since developed a high-tech, highly trained army, introduced compulsory military service and is said to be potentially the most lethal force in the Middle East after Israel.
But it will be the “white slaves” (including, of course, Americans of many different races) who will be endangered once again in an attempt to clean up the mess Trump has created, and they will most likely be condemned. Already 13 people have been killed and dozens injured, but those numbers could rise further if the Saudis fulfill their desire for a ground war.
And they may well do that. On Easter Sunday, of all days, came Trump’s abusive tweet, threatening that the United States would commit war crimes by destroying Iran’s civilian infrastructure if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened.
The F-bomb and its accompanying expletives brought back another memory: the tan suit Barack Obama wore to a press conference discussing Islamic State terrorism in 2014. Fox News fumed that this sartorial choice was “unpresidential.” One Fox commentator went so far as to claim that this “confirms that he is Marxist.”
There was no harsh reaction from Fox regarding the unpresidential nature of Trump’s deranged tweet. Fox on Monday glossed over the meager bet amid saturation news about the successful rescue of the downed airman. An airman put in mortal danger by an illegal war had his plane shot down even though the president had told the world just days earlier that Iran’s air defenses had been “completely destroyed” and that Iran was left with “no air defenses at all.”
When Trump was elected, I expected the worst. For example, I expected Project 2025 to implement its draconian policy goals — the far-right’s blueprint for destroying civil rights and social and environmental programs — and in fact, more than half of the stated goals have already been achieved.
But I didn’t expect this war. This was the one thing Trump clearly understood: There would be no more costly, deadly foreign wars on his watch. And now he has done the almost impossible: He has surpassed even my worst expectations with a war based on the lie of an imminent nuclear threat. A war filled with extreme cruelty and enormous incompetence.
I hope that somewhere in our own government, some real conversations are taking place behind all the cautious and carefully worded public calls for de-escalation. This is no longer the USA with which we were allies in World War II. It is no longer the country we have long (perhaps too long) sought safety from. It has become a dangerous, destabilizing force, causing serious damage to our economy and, through the terrible agreement called AUKUS, threatening to drag us into future wars of which we should have no part.
AUKUS was the Morrison government’s bad deal. The best time to order a review of poor costs (including the opportunity costs of such huge expenditure), its unrealistic assessments of shipbuilding capacity in both the US and the UK, and its dire strategic consequences, was immediately after the first election of the Albanian government. Second best time? Right now.
Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.
