As President Donald Trump has complained, the United States does not win wars anymore. In fact, since 1945, the only four military engagements it has won were over the small neo-colonial outposts of Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, and Kosovo. Americans across the political spectrum refer to the wars the United States has launched since 2001 as “endless” or “unwinnable.”
Trump has dropped at least 69,000 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—more than either Bush or Obama did in their first terms, including in Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
We know by now that there is no elusive victory around the corner that will redeem the criminal futility of the United States’ opportunistic decision to use military force more aggressively and illegally after the end of the Cold War and the horrific crimes of September 11. But all wars have to end one day, so how will these wars end?
As Trump nears the end of his first term, he knows that at least some Americans hold him responsible for his broken promises to bring U.S. troops home and wind down Bush’s and Obama’s wars. Trump’s own day-in-day-out war-making has gone largely unreported by the U.S. corporate media, but Trump has dropped at least 69,000 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—more than either Bush or Obama did in their first terms, including in Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Under cover of highly publicized redeployments of small numbers of troops from a few isolated bases in Syria and Iraq, Trump has actually expanded U.S. bases and deployed at least 14,000 more U.S. troops to the greater Middle East, even after the U.S. bombing and artillery campaigns that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria ended in 2017.
Under the U.S. agreement with the Taliban, Trump has finally agreed to withdraw 4,400 troops from Afghanistan by July, still leaving at least 8,600 behind to conduct airstrikes, “kill or capture” raids, and an even more isolated and beleaguered military occupation.
Now a compelling call by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a global ceasefire during the COVID-19 pandemic has given Trump a chance to gracefully de-escalate his unwinnable wars—if indeed he really wants to. More than seventy nations have expressed their support for the ceasefire.
Trump has so far spurned this chance to make good on his promise to bring U.S. troops home, even as his lost wars and ill-defined global military occupation expose thousands of troops to COVID-19.
President Macron of France claimed on April 15 that he had persuaded Trump to join other world leaders supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution backing the Secretary General’s call. But within days, it became clear that the United States was opposing the resolution, insisting that its own ”counterterrorism” wars must go on, and that any resolution must condemn China as the source of the pandemic, a poison pill calculated to draw a swift Chinese veto.
So Trump has so far spurned this chance to make good on his promise to bring U.S. troops home, even as his lost wars and ill-defined global military occupation expose thousands of troops to COVID-19. The U.S. navy has been plagued by the virus: As of mid-April, forty ships had confirmed cases, affecting 1,298 sailors. Training exercises, troop movements, and travel have been canceled for United States-based troops and their families. The military reported 7,145 cases as of May 1, with more falling sick every day.
The Pentagon has priority access to COVID-19 testing, protective gear, and other resources, so the catastrophic shortage of resources at civilian hospitals in New York and elsewhere are being exacerbated by shipping them all over the world to 800 military bases, many of which are already redundant, dangerous, or counter-productive.
Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen were already suffering from the worst humanitarian crises and most compromised health systems in the world, making them exceptionally vulnerable to the pandemic. The United States’ defunding of the World Health Organization leaves them in even worse straits.
Trump’s decision to keep U.S. troops fighting America’s long lost wars in Afghanistan and other war zones only makes it more likely that his presidency may be tainted by indelible images of helicopters rescuing Americans from embassy rooftops. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was purposely and presciently built with a helipad on the ground to avoid duplicating the United States’ iconic humiliation in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.
Meanwhile, nobody on Joe Biden’s staff seems to think the U.N.’s call for a global ceasefire is important enough to take a position on. While a credible accusation of sexual assault has sabotaged Biden's main message that “I’m different from Trump,” his recent hawkish rhetoric on China likewise smacks of continuity, not contrast, with Trump's attitudes and policies.
Like his predecessors from Truman to Obama, Trump has been caught in the trap of America’s blind, deluded militarism. No President wants to be the one who “lost” Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or any other country that has been politically sanctified with the blood of young Americans, even when the whole world knows they should not have been there in the first place.
In the parallel universe of American politics, the popular myths of American power and exceptionalism that sustain the military occupation of the American mind dictate continuity and deference to the military-industrial complex as the politically safe choice, even when the results are catastrophic in the real world.
While we recognize these perverse constraints on Trump’s decision-making, we think that the confluence of the U.N. ceasefire call, the pandemic, anti-war public opinion, the presidential election, and Trump’s glib promises to bring U.S. troops home may actually align with doing the right thing in this case.
If Trump were smart, he would seize this moment to embrace the U.N.’s global ceasefire with open arms; support a U.N. Security Council resolution to back up the ceasefire; start socially distancing U.S. troops from people trying to kill them and places where they are not welcome, and bring them home to the families and friends who love them.
If this is the only correct choice Trump ever makes as President, he will finally be able to claim that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize more than Barack Obama did.
This article first appeared in Common Dreams.