What is your “hopium”? What is the unreasonable and unfounded hope that you cling to? (Whoever invented that term should go to Paradise!)
It is like the opium of the masses: Israeli and American people believed that the military could solve the “Palestinian Problem,” and so Israel would be a heaven on Earth for the Jewish people. It couldn’t be because using force against people’s demands would never work. The Israeli army seems to have solved only one problem: it saved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from going into Israeli jail. We’ll see if it still saves him after the Dec. 10 graft testimony at the Jerusalem District Court.
Let's open a parenthesis here: Israel is the only country in the world that has a government office in someone else’s country! Jerusalem is an occupied Palestinian town, and that occupation has never been recognized by the United Nations, nor have the Palestinians ever acquiesced to this illegal appropriation.
But somehow, all the newsworthy hopium examples pile up around Donald Trump’s name, and they have some expectations related to wars, conflicts, bloodshed, etc., despite the fact that the man keeps telling us that in two months, if not earlier, all wars, enmities and hostilities will end!
For instance, retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane’s “hopium” is Trump’s rebuilding of the U.S. armed forces; yet again, the West will surely face the greatest peril since the Second World War II. You may ask where that peril is coming from. The former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army says Russia, China and North Korea see America as weak – and Donald Trump should address that threat "rapidly." So, the retired four-star general sleeps tight, hoping an unreasonable and unfounded hope, a military force, could solve his country’s geopolitical and commercial problems.
There are tens of books and hundreds of essays explaining the unavoidable shrinkage of the U.S. on the global stage because it can no longer afford to be the Global Hegemon. The U.S. has pushed to expand NATO eastward for the last 30 years. But all it has achieved is a war between two Slavic nations! In the first free elections, the Ukrainians might give the U.S. proxy neo-Nazis a sweep; the Georgians already rejected the U.S. offer to hem the Russians in from the south, and EU membership offered as a bribe for it. So, Trump’s former (and still hopeful) military adviser Jack Keane should keep narcotizing his worries that perhaps Trump would save the West from the greatest peril emanating from North Korea, of all the places!
Almost all the financial crackerjack researchers deftly lay out blueprints for the tariff wars that Trump is about to start. They are not totally off the mark here, though, because Trump’s flirting with those tariff hawks for the treasury secretary and U.S. trade representative. Trump did it once; everyone expects that he’ll start another trade war with Canada, Mexico and China on the first day of his presidency. This is the man who signed the Mexico-Canada-America trade deal in his first term. Two-thirds of Americans hope Donald Trump’s tariff plans are simply rhetorical tools designed to scare America’s trade partners to stop lowering their export prices. Some people hope against hope that higher import taxes on Mexican, Canadian and Chinese consumer goods will bring what the candidate Trump pointed at as “these empty, old, beautiful steel mills and factories that are falling” back.
Trump said in October, when talking about tariffs, “We’re going to bring the companies back.” How? He will lower taxes for those companies that are going to manufacture their products in the U.S. However, his Cabinet member carrying out tariff plans as commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has already started to evade what he and Trump said on the campaign trail, that is, tariffs would not be put on goods that the U.S. does not already produce: “When you’re running for office, you make broad statements, so people understand you.”
So, don’t expect any trade wars soon as large and as complete as the economy pundits cry into your beer. Trump tried it once; it didn’t work. American consumers will be fast crossing swords with him if companies pass increased costs onto them. Tariffs are not an amazing tool as Trump and his men assume in bringing new companies to those beautiful but falling-down factories. They are falling down for a reason and cheap imports are not that reason. Economists largely argue that tariffs won’t be instrumental in improving domestic manufacturing. It hadn’t worked that way eight years ago. The BBC commentator thinks that he wasn’t that serious but only trying to hang a sword over the world markets. Polls suggest that people did not believe this sudden bellicosity in economic policy platforms from the person who had signed the North American Trade Pact in his first term. Even a modest price increase would counter his campaign promises to bring down the cost of living.
Could the rationale behind the so-called tariff war be something else? Like punishing Mexico for migration and illegal drug traffic? Like, just hating Justin Trudeau (“that two-faced far-left lunatic,” according to Trump) and seeking to destabilize his government as he did in 2016? Like wanting fundamentally to change the economic world map and trying to reduce China into a status quo state?
Trump seems to dislike Neoconservatives this time around, although four years ago, he had agreed with them not to withdraw the U.S. forces from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. They are still there, in the U.S. diplomatic and military structures and no Rubio or Hegseth could purge State and Defense Departments. He may convince Ukraine, twisting Zelenskyy’s arm perhaps, to kiss Crimea and four other provinces goodbye and thus end Neocons’ proxy war on Russia, but the Deep State would not be content with a mere Tariff War with China. Neocons and other conservative and progressive “Reconstructionist” hawks could put off opening the Peking route through Moscow till a later time.
Another war zone seems to be the U.S. public schools. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” team promised (and obtained his approval) “attacking the very foundations of free, secular education.” Trump’s long history of anti-public-school advocacy had emboldened Evangelical far-right pastors “to create boot camps for winning back America” long before the election victory. Now his nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, a defendant in a lawsuit about sexual abuse of minors at World Wrestling Entertainment when she was CEO (she was a WWE wrestler herself!), is going to “build an underground army of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors.”
Yes, the underground advocates for theocracy rolled their sleeves to push the Evangelical (that is, Zionist Christianity) nationalist agenda into the taxpayer-funded public school system. But even if all the Evangelical pastors and their acolytes go to the barricades around the public schools, they cannot violate the Constitution. So, there will be some skirmishes around some schools but no trench warfare in the secular and liberal school systems.
What does one expect during the Trump years in the domestic and global political scene? Wars or not wars? Is he going to end all wars, or will he start new ones?
Politics is said to be the art of the possible. However, not all presidents are masters of creating possible politics. Like all bogus politicians, it seems that Trump will be wasting another four years in his hyperreality, fighting his fictitious wars and creating his simulated truces. Nothing’s real, but all would look like more real than real.
