‘Peace is at the price of buckling down to aggression.’
DAVID Halberstam’s epic book of this title narrates, in painful detail, how the men around John F. Kennedy (and later on Lyndon Johnson) were considered the best and the brightest of their time. But they were also the circle of advisers who guided America into the morass that became the Vietnam War, which lasted until April 1975 and cost the lives of 1.4 million civilians and armed combatants, including close to 300,000 young Americans and close to 500,000 Vietnamese civilians.
The parade of dead American soldiers arriving in flag-draped coffins provoked widespread protests on US campuses in the late 1960s, with the chant “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today” echoing nationwide. These protests were a major reason why Johnson, up for re-election in 1968, chose not to seek a second term (something which would not happen again until 2024).
The Vietnam War left a deep imprint on the American psyche. It fuels anti-war protests to this day, albeit staged by a new generation of Americans about wars in other parts of the world. And while far fewer American soldiers are directly in the line of fire, US support for one side of the various warring factions in the hotspots of the world drives anti-war activists at home to continue pressing successive US administrations to stay out of the lives of other people.
It’s what’s driving support for Donald Trump’s position that the war in Ukraine, for example, should be settled immediately. It is also driving support for his boast that he could bring the Israelis and the Palestinians to a peace deal as soon as he is elected (which was a few weeks ago).
Indeed, peace is possible under the scheme proposed by the president-elect, except for the fact that in at least one “theater of operations” (Ukraine) this could very well mean submitting to the aggression of one party at the expense of another.
Peace is at the price of buckling down to aggression. Sounds like England in the 1930s.
Every time an American administration takes office the world holds its collective breath. This is most applicable when the transition is from one of the two dominant political parties to the other. From the 1970s up to the 1980s, a Republican administration meant US support for strong governments abroad for as long as their leaders were staunch supporters of US foreign policy. This was the era of strongmen across the world who could count on US backing quite reliably.
In contrast, the advent of a Democratic administration meant more focus on human rights. While the projection of US power was never an issue it came as a fist inside velvet gloves.
Trade policy rarely differed and who were allies and who weren’t were almost always the same.
Come January 2025 all bets are off. Foreign policy will be driven to a large extent by the personal (and business?) links that DJT has established, which in some cases are with leaders previously anathema in American foreign policy. This will have far-reaching implications in every part of the globe, and for the Philippines especially as it wrestles with the issue of China and the West Philippine Sea.
Let’s wait and see how the incoming “best and the brightest” acquit (no pun intended!) themselves!