Will Trump’s Legacy Be Saved if He Starts World War III?
Executive Director of the Eisenhower Media Network, retired Major General Dennis Laich has written what every American – and every Member of Congress – needs to read, hear and understand before the sun sets today.
It starts with a simple question, “Could the US win a war with a near-peer adversary today?” It’s a good question, one that we – and our President – ought to be able to answer with confidence.
General Laich is confident: “Should America continue to bully weaker nations, more powerful nations could intervene, risking a war that could end this 250‑year democratic experiment, or worse for civilization, trigger nuclear armageddon.”
His analysis is crisp, yet comprehensive, covering manpower, material, and money. Laich is direct, logical and crystal clear. This piece is particularly timely, given Trump’s ongoing bullying of Iran, at the behest and demand of Netanyahu.
Trump, whose bone spurs prevented him from personally experiencing a previous era of DC stupidity, lies, and forced errors in Vietnam, one of many wars the US military has fought without a Congressional Declaration of War, and one we lost. I always say we haven’t won a war since 1945, but I have my own definition of “winning” a war. General Laich puts it this way: “Since World War II, the U.S. has won one war, tied another, and lost three: a win in the 1990-91 Gulf War, a tie in Korea, and losses in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”
Note that the wars we “lost”, the one we “won” and the one we “tied” were all fought against NON-near-peer adversaries.
This is one of the reasons our military spending produces very little beyond profit for a handful of companies and kickbacks for Congress. It explains the massive, opaque, unaccountable and obscene racket that idiotic Presidents, chicken-hawk senators and congressmen, defense lobbies and Pentagon revolving doors have created. There is a reason the Pentagon can’t pass an audit. It doesn’t have to, and only a few in Congress believe it should ever be able to.
Those of us who have experienced military service, or worked in military circles, or studied military history, or American history, or read the Constitution, recognize the honesty in General Laich’s assessment and advice. But how can logic and honesty reach political decision-makers in an era of exciting and politically opportune war overseas?
In 1964, the DC swamp wanted a good war in Vietnam, and LBJ needed both conservative and liberal DC swamp support. The win-win was found in the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution – a Congressional response to a US engineered false flag designed to move the war needle and ensure LBJ’s re-election. The Vietnam War went parabolic, until all was lost. But with the 1964 war promoters in Congress and the swamp satisfied, LBJ got the support he needed to pursue his domestic programs, including a war against poverty, which was at least as misguided and poorly led, it too eventually lost. LBJ was no fan of the Vietnam war, but it was the price he was willing to pay to achieve his domestic agenda. That price can be measured, and beyond untold death and destruction for Vietnam, and the ultimate sacrifice of 58,000 American soldiers, it was our first “trillion dollar war.”
Donald Trump was 18 years on in 1964. In the intervening 70 years, Trump concluded that in many ways the United States was on the wrong track, and he ran for president three times on a campaign that emphasized strengthening the American core, bringing our troops home from the 150 countries to which they were deployed, ending wars of choice and promoting prosperity at home. He was elected or nearly elected three times on this platform of peace and non-intervention. His voters and supporters erroneously believed that Donald Trump had learned the same lessons that so many who served in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had learned.
But he had not. Instead, like LBJ, Trump is willing to trade numerous unnecessary and doomed wars in a play for executive power, to satisfy his donor class, and to create a legacy. Like George W. Bush, he will trade “righteous” yet unnecessary wars for being seen as a do-nothing imbecile who would otherwise have been only remembered for hanging chads in Palm Beach County.
Trump will be remembered for many things, and it will be a partisan and fragmented memory. Like Judge Napolitano, many will credit Trump as ushering in a Constitutional Ice Age. Those with Trump Derangement Syndrome should remember Trump as the worst Democrat to ever run as a Republican and win, twice. His strongest supporters will be divided between a majority who can’t believe how convincingly he lied to them, and a minority who will use mysticism to explain the unexplainable.
However, Trump wants to be remembered as the President who preserved the United States as the dominant economic and military force on the planet, the President who increased prosperity at home and peace abroad, against all odds.
Trump, for all his talents, has learned little that can help the United States today. The American imperial era is fading, sinking under the weight of government bankruptcy and a consumer-based economy dependent on the very employment sectors that blockchain, robotics and AI are rapidly disrupting. Americans are increasingly poorly educated, and many struggle to meet their own needs, under a complex system of regressive taxation and minutely detailed regulations designed by and for the upper crust.
Not understanding what to do, Trump seeks autocracy, to be guided by his own mind, and his own morality. A worthy aspiration, but in Trump’s own case, he is both wrongly informed and easily manipulated, and his immorality is increasingly on display: he faithfully supports genocide in Gaza and is passive on ethnic cleansing in the West Bank; he lies about, pardons and seeks to use the Executive branch to protect his friends and donors from criminal charges; he has extended the unnecessary war between Ukraine/Nato/US and Russia while posing as a mediator; and he arrogantly claims to own other countries, and have the right to choose their leadership, in the name of democracy. He has bombed more countries in 12 months than any of his predecessors, all without declarations of war and in the absence of a single threat to the US, and this list doesn’t count the billions and billions of dollars worth of weapons and munitions he gave to Ukraine and Israel to bomb Russia and Gaza.
Which brings us to Iran, another war for Israel, another regime change for the unholy dollar, with a Carrier Battle Group sitting off the Strait of Hormuz, massive Air Force buildup across the Middle East, extra oil sent to Israel to keep the lights on, and Trumpian trash talk posing as diplomacy. The USS Gerald Ford has been diverted from one regime change operation to another, instead of returning to its home port for scheduled maintenance.
Waning empires go broke, go to war, then go to ground. Narcissistic autocrats are predictable in this phase, and often valued by the people, but the end result is the same. Brace for impact, and prepare your minds as proud Americans for sights we have not yet seen, and insults we have not yet suffered, because of the sheer stupidity of Washington, and a new generation of uniformed Westmorelands.
https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/p/will-trumps-legacy-be-saved-if-he