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    What Explains the COVID-19 East-West Divide?

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    COVID-19 has been ruthless in choosing winners and losers around the world. The obvious “losers” have been those countries led by right-wing nationalists: Brazil, India, Russia, the United Kingdom and (until recently) the United States. These five countries are responsible for more than half of the world’s coronavirus infections and nearly half the deaths.

    Just as obviously, the “winners” have been the countries of Asia. Although China and South Korea were both hit hard early on in the pandemic, they have managed to recover quite dramatically. The rest of the region, meanwhile, has suffered nowhere near the same magnitude of adverse consequences that Europe or the Americas have experienced. Taiwan has had fewer than 1,000 infections and only seven deaths. Vietnam had had about 1,500 infections and 35 deaths. Thailand has had over 13,000 infections but only 75 deaths. Mongolia has had under 1,700 infections and only two deaths.

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    Even the less fortunate countries in the region have managed to control the pandemic better than the West has. Burma has suffered over 130,000 infections, but just over 3,000 deaths. Malaysia has had 185,000 infections but only 700 deaths, while Japan has had over 360,000 infections but just under 5,200 deaths. Singapore has actually had the largest per-capita number of infections in the region but has registered only 29 deaths. The two relative outliers are the Philippines, with over 500,000 infections and 10,000 deaths, and Indonesia, with nearly a million infections and over 28,000 deaths.

    High Marks

    It’s not as if these countries have avoided the various surges that have taken place globally as a result of holiday travel, the loosening of restrictions or the new variants of the disease. But even among the outliers, the renewed outbreaks have been several magnitudes smaller than what Europe or the Americas have faced.

    To give you a sense of how relatively successful even these outliers have been, imagine if the Trump administration had handled the pandemic as poorly as the worst-performing Asian nation. Rodrigo Duterte is in many ways the Donald Trump of Asia. But if the United States had managed to follow the Filipino example, the United States would now be facing 1.5 million cases of infection and only 30,000 deaths. Instead, America not long ago passed the 25-million mark in cases and the 400,000-deaths mark.

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    Now imagine if the Trump administration had dealt with the pandemic as successfully as Vietnam. The United States would have been hit by under 5,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Vietnam is a communist country that can impose draconian restrictions without fear of backlash? Okay, if we use Taiwan as the yardstick for comparison, the United States would have 15,000 infections and a little over 100 deaths. Not fair, you say, because Taiwan is an island? Okay, if we use South Korea as the baseline, the United States would have had 450,000 infections and about 8,000 deaths.

    Any way you look at it, the United States did worse than every single country in Asia. If America had just managed to handle the crisis as effectively as the worst-performing Asian country, close to 400,000 more Americans would be alive today.

    It’s easy to blame Trump for this woeful discrepancy between America and Asia. After all, according to the first Global Health Security Index released in 2019, the United States came out on top in terms of its readiness to deal with a pandemic. US hospitals routinely receive high marks in global lists. A failure of governance would seem to be the key distinguishing factor, particularly in light of all the mistakes the Trump administration made from day one, errors that the president compounded through ignorance, incompetence and sheer foolishness.

    But many of the governments in Asia made similar mistakes. Duterte has been widely criticized for delays and missteps. South Korean leader Moon Jae-in faced calls for impeachment early in the crisis because of the government’s failure to prevent the first outbreaks. So, perhaps at least some of the fault lies elsewhere: not in our political stars, but in ourselves.

    East vs. West

    After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West indulged in more than a little triumphalism. Pundits fell over each other in their eagerness to declare that the individual had prevailed over the collective, capitalism had vanquished communism, and the West was the best (so forget about the rest).

    Many people in Asia, however, begged to differ.  Maybe you remember the debate in the 1990s around “Eastern” vs. “Western” values. Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with their house intellectuals, claimed that Asian countries had superior value systems than those of the West.

    Rather than unstable democracies, disruptive human rights movements and the overwhelming cult of the individual, the East valued harmony, order and the common good. These values, it argued, made possible the continuous economic success of the Asian Tigers — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — not to mention the earlier accomplishments of Japan, the leapfrogging rise of mainland China and the copycat efforts of the Tiger Cubs — Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. The proof was in the productivity.

    The counterarguments came quickly from such august figures as Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, and Amartya Sen of India. They pointed out that there’s nothing inherently Western about human rights and democracy. Both South Korea and Taiwan, after all, democratized without putting a dent in their economic growth. Human rights movements had mass appeal in Burma, the Philippines and elsewhere in the region. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which devastated countries in the region, it became increasingly difficult to argue that the East was immune from the same economic problems that plagued capitalism in the West.

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    As a result, the “Eastern values” camp gradually faded from view. Good riddance to bad theory. The dividing line between East and West was spurious in so many ways, reminiscent of older stereotypes of the East as “unchanging” or “inscrutable.”

    And yet, today, COVID-19 has drawn a clear line between Asia and the rest of the world. What’s particularly striking about this latest divergence is the lack of significance in types of governance. The countries that have been successful in Asia have very different forms of government, from communist (Vietnam) to democratic (Taiwan) to military dictatorship (Thailand). Moreover, they have different histories, religious backgrounds, and relationships with the countries of the West. The only thing they share, it would seem, is what realtors are always going on about: location, location, location. So, should we be resurrecting “Eastern values” to explain such a startling difference in outcomes during this pandemic era?

    Three Reasons

    The most important reason that Asia reacted to COVID-19 with greater seriousness and better results has to do not with ancient history but with more recent experience. In 2003, the region was blindsided by the SARS epidemic. The first cases emerged in southern China in late 2002. By March, the new coronavirus was showing up in Hong Kong and Vietnam as well. Eventually, it would appear in 29 countries and result in over 700 deaths. By July, after unprecedented international cooperation, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic contained.

    Think of SARS as a virus that stimulated Asia’s immunological system. That system went into hyperdrive to fight off the infection. Once Asia successfully beat off the new disease, a certain immunity remained. That immunity was not biological, in the sense that the populations of the region had any resistance to novel coronaviruses. Rather, the immunity consisted of a heightened awareness of the problem, a new set of institutions and practices developed to fight future attacks, and a historical memory among a certain generation of political leadership. The rest of the world, which avoided the brunt of SARS, didn’t develop that kind of immunity.

    A second advantage that Asian countries have enjoyed is a coordinated central government response. After its initial denial of COVID-19, Beijing soon switched into high gear to contain the spread of the disease by locking down Wuhan and other hot spots and severely restricting internal travel. South Korea moved rapidly to institute a nationwide test-and-trace system. Taiwan quickly made masks available, imposed an immediate quarantine system and monitored citizens digitally. Countries in the region with less tightly federated structures — Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia — weren’t able to react as quickly or as consistently. But even they were models of central authority compared to the kind of policy clash between the center and the periphery that so complicated the pandemic response in countries like Brazil and the United States.

    The third advantage, and this comes the closest to a revival of the “Eastern values” argument, is the issue of compliance. The American anti-mask mentality, for instance, has no real counterpart in Asia. Sure, plenty of people in the region have issues with their governments and with state regulations. A number of the countries in the region, like South Korea, are notoriously low-trust. But throughout the region, citizens have greater respect for scientific authority and greater respect for community standards. And those who for whatever reason choose to flout this authority and these standards are quickly shamed into compliance.

    As Lawrence Wright points out in his thorough piece on COVID-19 in The New Yorker, consistent mask use stands out as a determinant of success in containing the spread of the virus. “Hong Kong was one of the world’s densest cities, but there was no community spread of the virus there, because nearly everyone wore masks,” he writes. “Taiwan, which was manufacturing ten million masks per day for a population of twenty-three million, was almost untouched. Both places neighbored China, the epicenter.”

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    Anti-vaccine sentiment is also quite low in Asia. According to a 2018 survey, 85% of people in Asia believe vaccines are safe — the highest of any region in the world. Although anti-vaxxers have managed to spread their messages in Asia, it’s notably been in the two countries with the worst records on COVID-19: the Philippines and Indonesia. Elsewhere, vaccination levels have remained high.

    It’s not just deference to science or fear of public shaming. Compliance may also derive from a stronger sense of the common good. It’s not as if harmony prevails over Asia like a benevolent weather front. Look at the political polarization in Thailand that has led to multiple mass demonstrations and military coups. Or the rapid alternation in power of different political parties in Taiwan and South Korea. But underneath the great divisions in these societies is a persistent belief in pulling together during a crisis rather than pulling apart.

    It is impossible to imagine a scenario in any Asian country like what transpired in the United States during the January 6 insurrection. Lawmakers evacuated from the congressional floor found themselves packed into a small, windowless lockdown room. If ever there were a time for bipartisanship, it was during this attack on American democracy. Yet some Republican legislators, although they quite obviously couldn’t maintain social distance in this crowded space, refused to wear the masks offered to them. They couldn’t even pretend to care about the health and safety of others, and several lawmakers indeed tested positive for COVID-19 after this experience. This is the American response to the pandemic writ small: astonishing selfishness and ideological rigidity.

    In Asia, it’s very possible that the successful efforts by governments to contain COVID-19 will lead to a virtuous circle of trust, if not in the governments, then at least in social institutions like medical authorities, as this recent study from South Korea suggests. The West, meanwhile, is descending into a vicious circle of mistrust that vaccinations, herd immunity that the exile of Trump to Florida will not be enough to forestall. Forget about so-called Eastern values for a moment. The West needs to look more carefully at its own values since they are clearly not fit for purpose at a time of crisis.

    *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Live Free or Die: America vs. Science

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      A few days ago, the testimony of a nurse from South Dakota made international headlines. In a tweet, Jodi Doering recounted the harrowing experience of having to deal with patients dying from COVID-19 complications while denying that the virus is real: “The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is (g)oing to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real.”

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      By now, North and South Dakotas have earned the distinction of being among the states hit hardest by the second wave of the pandemic — and least prepared for its impact. As in so many of America’s red states dominated by the Republican Party, the good citizens of the Dakotas largely ignored reality, and this is putting it graciously. As a recent article in The New York Times put it, “Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, when there was no doubt about the damage that Covid-19 could do, the Dakotas scaled their morbid heights, propelled by denial and defiance.” Public officials did their part reinforcing the illusion, adamantly refusing to mandate basic safety measures, such as the wearing of masks and keeping social distancing rules.

      Live Free or Die

      “Live Free or Die” — ironically enough, the motto of the blue state of New Hampshire in New England — assumed an entirely new meaning in the Dakotas. At the end of November, the Bismarck Tribune reported that a quarter of North Dakotans had known somebody who had died of COVID-19. At the start of this month, just three weeks after reporting the highest mortality rate in the world, North Dakota hit a new record: One in 800 residents here has died of COVID-19.

      In South Dakota, where the governor refused to mandate safety measures, things were equally bad. Intensive care units in small towns were quickly getting overwhelmed as the pandemic ravaged the very fabric of civil society, which observers such as Alex de Tocqueville have considered essential to the health of American democracy. And yet,  as Annie Gowan writes in The Washington Post, “anti-maskers” have continued to agitate, “alleging that masks don’t work and that the measure was an overreach that would violate their civil rights.” Given the fact that wearing a mask is above all a means to protect others against infection, this is a rather specious argument.

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      There has been widespread resistance to following the most basic safety precautions. Clinging on to a false sense of liberty is one reason, but arguably not the most important one. Instead, what infuses the refusal to take COVID-19 seriously among a substantial part of the American public is a profound suspicion toward health care experts, the scientific community and science-based evidence in general.

      This is part of a larger populist syndrome, which has suffused significant parts of the United States over the past several years and which was instrumental in propelling Donald Trump into the White House four years ago. Populism represents above all a revolt against the established elite — economic, political, social, cultural — in the name of ordinary citizens and their allegedly superior “common sense.”  Populists promote the virtue of personal experience and observation — Trump famously asked how global warming could be real if it was so cold outside — and the rule of thumb.

      Add to that the impact of right-wing influencers and opinion leaders like Rush Limbaugh, who in early spring claimed that COVID-19 was nothing more than the flu and who has insisted that masks are a symbol of fear and therefore “un-American.” No wonder that in the land of the free, that vast landmass between the two coasts, disparaged by the “coastal elites” as “flyover country,” they rather believe in the wisdom of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the Great Man himself than the “disaster” Anthony Fauci and his “idiots” in the scientific community.

      As a result, according to a recent Pew survey, in the United States, public opinion about COVID-19 has been far more divided than in comparable advanced liberal democracies. In October, more than 80% of Biden supporters said that COVID-19 was “very important” for their vote; among Trump supporters, less than a quarter. At the same time, there was a large partisan divide on trust in scientists. In September, more than two-thirds of liberal Democrats expressed trust in scientists; among conservative Republicans, less than 20%.

      Under the circumstances, the health care catastrophe that has invested the Dakotas and other parts of the American Midwest should come as no surprise. It is part of the disastrous legacy four years of President Trump have left, a legacy that has poisoned the political climate to an extent never before seen in the United States.

      Human, All Too Human

      Over the past several months, COVID-19 — what it is, what it means and how to respond to it —has become part of the polarization that has consumed American politics way before the onset of the pandemic. Polarization means that almost everything political is defined in partisan terms. Extended to its most extreme, it means that the other side is no longer seen as legitimate, but as the enemy that needs to be destroyed since it poses a fundamental threat to the common good.

      This, of course, is the fundamental dictum of Carl Schmitt, the brilliant 19th-century German legal and political theorist whose posthumous influence has significantly grown over the past few decades, both on the left and on the right. Schmitt was a great supporter of the Nazis, infamous for his defense of Hitler’s order in 1934 to eliminate his adversaries (the Röhm Purge) in an article with the cynical title, “The Führer Protects the Law.” Central to Schmitt’s thinking was the notion that democracy meant both to treat equals as equals and to treat not-equals as not-equals. For Schmitt, democracy required homogeneity as well as the exclusion, even “destruction of the heterogeneous.” No wonder Carl Schmitt has found enthusiastic acolytes among China’s patriotic intelligentsia.

      It is within this context that the dismissal of the threat posed by COVID-19 as, at best, negligible and, at worst, as a hoax designed to undermine the Trump administration becomes understandable.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has been obsessed with China. Trump’s pet project of making America great again only makes sense in the face of the challenge that the fulminant rise of China has posed to America’s claim to be the greatest country in the world. The way the slogan is phrased already reveals its weakness. Making America great “again” implies a recognition that it no longer is. There are numerous reasons why this might be the case. Most of them — such as decrepit infrastructure or the opioid crisis — have nothing to do with China.

      But, as Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, it is human, all too human to blame others for one’s own shortcomings. This might explain why Trump has insisted on referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” most recently in a tweet acknowledging that Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer who had “been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA” had been tested positive for the “China Virus.” Giuliani has done no such thing, i.e., exposing massive election fraud. Giuliani once was a respectable politician, arguably one of the best mayors New York City has ever had. By now, he is reminiscent of Wormtail, Voldemort’s pathetic factotum.

      Trump’s obsession with China not only explains his nonchalance toward COVID-19 but also his take on climate change and global warming. It deserves remembering that at one time, Trump was adamant about his concern regarding the climate. In 2009, Trump, together with his three oldest children, signed an open letter to the Obama administration that stated, “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.” Among other things, the letter called for “U.S. climate legislation, investment in the clean energy economy, and leadership to inspire the rest of the world to join the fight against climate change.”

      I Don’t Believe It

      A couple of years later, all was forgotten. By 2012, the focus was on China’s rapid ascent. In this context, global warming assumed a new meaning in Trump’s narrative. As he put it in a tweet at the time, the “concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Three years later, he referred to climate change as a hoax, and, once in office, he dismissed the warnings of his own government’s scientists with a simple “I don’t believe it.”

      Trump’s denial of climate change had a significant impact among his support base. In 2018, more than two-thirds of Republicans considered concerns about global warming to be exaggerated; among Democrats, less than 5% thought so. Around a third of Republicans thought global warming was caused by human activities; among Democrats, some 90%. And when asked whether they thought global warming would pose a serious threat in their lifetime, a mere 18% of Republicans voiced concern among Democrats, about two-thirds.

      A month before the November election, an article in Nature sounded the alarm bell. As the election approached, the author warned, “Trump’s actions in the face of COVID-19 are just one example of the damage he has inflicted on science and its institutions over the past four years, with repercussions for lives and livelihoods.” In the process, his administration, across many federal agencies, had “undermined scientific integrity by suppressing or distorting evidence to support political decisions.”

      In November, Trump spectacularly lost his bid for a second term. At the end of January, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the new president. There is great hope that this will be the beginning of a “new dawn for America.” Don’t bet on it. Trump’s legacy is likely to linger on, some of the harm his administration has caused potentially exerting its impact for years to come. One of the most deleterious legacies is that by now, belief in science — at least with respect to certain issues — has become overridden by partisanship.

      Climate change is a prominent example, so is COVID-19, and so is likely to be the question of vaccination as anti-coronavirus jabs become available over the next few months. In late November, among Democrats, 75% said they would get vaccinated; among Republicans, only half. Under the circumstances, it is probably prudent to be wary.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Donald Trump’s War With the Troops

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      My father enlisted in the Army to fight in World War II. He was 19 or 20 years old, and he wanted to defeat the Nazis. He was one of a million other young Americans to sign up that year. But my father was also a fun-loving guy who played clarinet in a jazz band and liked to party. Instead of reporting for duty, he went AWOL on a bender. When he showed up late at the military base, he was assigned to the kitchen patrol to peel potatoes. As a result, he stayed behind when his unit shipped out. According to my father’s version of events, that entire unit perished somewhere in the Pacific.

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      From then on, my father did everything he could to avoid getting sent overseas. He was part of a group of radiomen who continually failed their final test. Spending the entire war stateside in a succession of Army bases, he developed a distinctly anti-war perspective. Together with my mother, whom he met at an Army dance, he passed that philosophy onto his children.

      Stupid War

      I shudder to think that I have any overlap with US President Donald Trump. But we both inherited our discomfort with the military from our fathers. Fred Trump preferred to focus on the business of making money. My father had his close brush with war, and it changed his life.

      Many other members of the Greatest Generation had a similar change of heart as my father. Like every preceding generation, they experienced the horrors of combat and suffered trauma for much of their postwar lives. Some learned that the other side, too, used the language of “sacrifice” to push young men into battle and persuade families on the home front to accept economic austerity. Some even came to agree with Smedley Butler, the retired Marine Corps major general who wrote, in 1935, that “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”

      Donald Trump knows a racket when he sees one. Growing up wealthy and white, Trump saw no reason to sacrifice limb or life to serve his country. The military was a lousy career for a would-be billionaire who had his own scams to foist on the American public. As my father discovered, the military was often a career-ender, particularly during wartime. Lots of other men of Trump’s generation avoided the military. Joe Biden received five deferments, and so did Dick Cheney. Bernie Sanders applied for conscientious objector status and then aged out of the draft. Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton — they all somehow skipped the Vietnam War.

      Unlike these men, however, Trump said aloud what most of them must have been thinking — that the United States was involved in a “stupid war” in Vietnam. Trump has gone much further by disparaging military service his entire life. Trump’s anti-military remarks reported in a recent article in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg, “Trump Calls Americans Who Died in War ‘Losers,’” are no surprise. Because they are blunter than even what the president blurts in public, the alleged remarks are causing a larger than usual frisson of schadenfreude among anti-Trumpers, and I confess to my own delight at the frenzy of denials coming from the White House.

      Perhaps The Atlantic article will subtract just enough supporters from Trump’s side to ensure his defeat in November. Military support for the president was already slipping before the publication of the article: Trump had a 20% lead over Hillary Clinton in active-duty support in 2016, but Joe Biden now has the edge of 4% in this critical demographic. The military remains the most trusted institution in American society. It’s political suicide to diss the troops.

      Trump’s comments are not going to change the way Americans think about war. He has neither the war record nor the gravitas of a Smedley Butler. But with the coronavirus pandemic is racking up more casualties on the home front than the United States lost in combat during World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined, America is perhaps at a watershed moment when it comes to the meaning of sacrifice.

      Trump’s Approach to War

      Americans are tired of war. That was one element of Trump’s support in 2016. He criticized America’s “endless wars,” promised to bring US soldiers home and decried the corruption of the military-industrial complex. Aside from some token reduction of troops from Afghanistan and Syria and the closure of a US base in Germany, Trump has not honored his promises. He has pumped money into the military-industrial complex and brought its top people into his administration, like Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist. Nor has Trump fundamentally altered US military footprint in the world.

      True, Congress and the Pentagon have blocked some of Trump’s plans. But the real problem has been Trump’s own ambivalence. The man might not like soldiers or the military more generally. But he likes power and force. He likes to give orders to all the generals he has appointed as advisers. Above all, Trump likes to break things. If your intention is to smash a china shop, the Pentagon is just the bull you need.

      Remember, this is the guy who promised to “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State. He fulfilled that promise, killing a large number of citizens in the process. Trump also refused to stop helping Saudi Arabia do the same to Yemen. Last year, he vetoed a bipartisan congressional effort to withdraw US assistance for a war that has pulverized one of the poorest countries in the world. In his statement, Trump said, “This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      It’s difficult to imagine that an effort to end a war would endanger the lives of “brave service members.” But read another way — that weakening Trump’s power endangers American citizens and soldiers — the sentence perfectly encapsulates the president’s me-first mentality.

      Trump might have an aversion to putting US boots on foreign soil, but he sure loves waging war from the air. In his first two years, Trump ordered 238 drone strikes — compared to the 186 strikes that Obama launched in his first two years. And he has made it more difficult to find out how many people have died in those strikes. Yet, as The Intercept reports, intrepid organizations continue to try to determine how often the administration conducts its aerial missions: “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the U.S. carried out about 1,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen in 2016 — that is, strikes by both drones and manned aircraft. So far in 2019, they believe that the U.S. has conducted 5,425 airstrikes, five times as many. In the month of September, the U.S. upped the pace to almost 40 airstrikes per day.”

      Then there are the wars that Trump is threatening to unleash. He has continually upped the ante in the conflict with Iran, most recently attempting to trigger “snapback” sanctions that would doom the nuclear deal once and for all. Allies and adversaries alike rejected the US gambit. Meanwhile, even as he adds yet another round of sanctions against Chinese firms, Trump is pushing the US military to confront China in its own backyard by increasing U2 overflights and “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea.

      Lest you think the war on terror has ended in other parts of the world, the US Africa Command continues to conduct operations across the continent. As Nick Turse, Sam Mednick and Amanda Sperber report in the Mail & Guardian:

      “In 2019, U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 22 African countries: Algeria, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Tanzania, and Tunisia.

      This accounts for a significant proportion of U.S. Special Operations forces’ global activity: more than 14 percent of U.S. commandos deployed overseas in 2019 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the greater Middle East.”
      So, let’s put to rest (once again) the notion that Donald Trump is interested in restraining the military. In addition to pumping the Pentagon full of cash, he has ensured that it can conduct its actual war-fighting with as much flexibility and in as many places as possible.

      Post-Trump Sacrifice

      Donald Trump has devoted his life to hedonism and the accumulation of personal power. His dismissal of military service is actually the least of his sins. He doesn’t believe in sacrificing anything for others. He entered politics purely as a vehicle for his own self-aggrandizement. But the alternative to Trump is not the glorification of military service. War is stupid. Devoting one’s life to extinguishing the lives of others is not the answer the world needs at this time of pandemic and climate catastrophe.

      Coming out of the Trump era (I hope), it’s difficult to imagine Americans making a collective sacrifice for anything when even the mandatory wearing of masks is seen by some as too much of an abridgment of individual liberty.

      Imagine asking gun-owning Americans to hand in their weapons, en masse, in order to make the country a safer place. Imagine asking wealthier Americans to tighten their belts in order to rebuild the economy along more equitable lines. Imagine asking Americans to give up their non-electric cars, their jobs in the dirty-energy sector or their frequent airline travel to help save the world from climate catastrophe.

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      At the same time, the pandemic has brought mutual aid to the foreground. In the absence of coordinated responses from states, people have banded together to help their friends, neighbors and communities. This is all impressive, but it’s a stopgap, not a strategy. The problems facing the world can’t just be solved by individuals volunteering their time and energy. Indeed, the notion of voluntary service, like enlisting to fight in World War II, is antiquated. Ultimately it is as fragile a concept as the voluntary compliance expected of the world’s nations in the Paris Climate Agreement.

      Imagine if traffic were organized on the basis of mutual aid and volunteerism. There would be a few well-run intersections. The rest would be chaos and accidents. Traffic on the ground, on the water and up in the air requires states to establish the rules of the road and punish non-compliance. That is what is necessary, post-Trump. US society desperately needs fair, equitable rules of the road. And scofflaws have to be punished.

      The next administration needs to reestablish the rule of law in America, cracking down on vigilante violence, police violence and executive-branch violence. I can’t think of a better place to begin than by putting the Scofflaw-in-Chief on trial for all of his law-breaking. A long prison sentence would be a fitting cap to Trump’s career.

      But poetic justice dictates a different punishment. After a lifetime of selfishness, Trump should be sentenced to a very long period of community service. Wouldn’t you like to see the former president picking up trash by the side of the road for the rest of his life?

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More