Post-Trump priorities: War and the rule of law

Continuing the theme of the last post, restoring the rule of law in the US, it’s important to remember that violations of international law by the US often – even inevitably – spill over into domestic practices. There was some real pushback and reform in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency.

Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) was a well-known liberal historian who had a passion for seeing current politics through liberal Enlightenment values. He was a prominent and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and the rank criminality of the Nixon Administration. In the introduction to a 1974 book collecting several of his essays, he gives a scathing description of the blundering recklessness which so often characterized US policy up to that point in the Cold War. Much more cutting criticism than we normally see today, especially in legacy media. The period of post-1989 Cold War triumphalism invited people to shift their focus away from what was often the (literally) bloody mess of US policy during those years.

Commager says there of the US role in the Vietnam War, “Rarely before in history had a great nation drifted so mindlessly into catastrophe.” (1)

His 1974 description of US policy in Latin America brings to mind the old saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Just as earlier Presidents intervened in the affairs of Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean, so their present-day successors intervene in Guatemala, Cuba, Santo Domingo and, through the Central Intelligence Agency, in many other South American nations.

Mexico and Venezuela are still on the Trump 2.0 regime’s hit list. And, of course, the US collectively has never forgiven Cuba for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Prompted in no small part by the US contempt for international law in dealing with Cuba’s revolutionary government.

And he noted how a nationalistic myth of American goodness and purity provided a convenient cover for actions that were anything but pure:

When, in the last war [he means the Second World War], Germans destroyed villages because they had harbored snipers, we were justly outraged; but any Vietnamese who so much as fires a gun at one of our planes invites the instant destruction of his village by our outraged airmen. We looked with horror on the concentration camps of the last war; but we set up ''refugee" camps in Vietnam which are, for all practical purposes, concentration camps. And we have driven as large a proportion of the Vietnamese people from their homes, destroyed as much of their forests, their crops, their dams, their villages, as did the Germans in the Low Countries or in France in the last war.

Early Cold War obsessions about Communism led to the many domestic legal excesses of what we now remember as the McCarthy period. The “loyalty oaths” that many universities and colleges required back then were about swearing not to be Communist. The Trumpian versions today are about swearing to not criticize genocidal actions by Israel, armed and funded by US support. In international law, other countries are obligated not to support a nation committing genocide.

And he makes the connection between government lawlessness toward its own citizens and residents and the widespread tolerance of barbaric and criminal behavior in foreign policy:

As we have greater power than any other nation, so we should display greater moderation in using it and greater humility in justifying it. We display neither moderation nor humility, but immoderation and that arrogance of power which Senator Fulbright has so eloquently denounced. In the long run, then, the abuse of the executive power cannot be separated from the abuse of national power. If we subvert world order and destroy world peace, we must inevitably subvert and destroy our own political institutions first. This we are now [1974] in the process of doing.

And when it comes to official dishonesty, the Vietnam War and other US adventures in war and subversion were a major stepping-stone to the post-truth era of today, where the Trump cult defines reality as whatever words are coming out of the mouth of the Orange Leader. Commager notes in the book, “Never before in our own history has government employed so many methods for manipulating and distorting the truth as during the past decade, not even during the First and Second World Wars.”

The domestic lawlessness of Trump 2.0 in such things as turning ICE agents into a masked Gestapo that illegally kidnaps, imprisons, and deports people including American citizens is very much connected to that disregard for law we have had for a long time in foreign policy. Someone who can cheerfully defend the US funding the deliberate mass killing and deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza will most likely to be cheering for US concentration camps like Alligator Auschwitz in Florida.

Speaking of concentration camps and foreign policy corrupting the domestic rule of law, we have recently had a dramatic reminder of the famous saying by Gavin Stevens, a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”

USA Today’s Bluesky image for An August 23 story: (2)

Notes:

(1) Commager, Henry Steele (1974): The Defeat of America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

(2) Cuevas, Eduardo & Villagran, Lauren (2025): Army base used for WWII Japanese internment will be nation's largest ICE detention center. USA Today 08/23/2025. <https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/23/texas-army-base-japanese-internment-ice-detention/85767850007/> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).