At Trump’s command, the US military is adding forces and use of force everywhere: Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Korea. Victory is ill-defined in all these places, but the question remains. Will Trump win?
I predict that he will lose, and so America will lose. In Korea, we’ve been at the Yalu once before and China entered North Korea in numbers, throwing American forces back to the 38th parallel. That simply means that China is not going to buckle under to Trump. He won’t win there. In Afghanistan, there is no way he’ll win. The reconstituted Taliban shows that. Somalia has been a losing ground for the US military once before and will be again. Trump will not devote the enormous numbers of boots on the ground that it would take really to win in either Afghanistan or Somalia.
The more that the US military presence goes up in Iraq and Yemen, the more that it means the US is not winning anything. At best the US neutralizes ISIS in that region, i.e. restores the previous unstable status quo. The US lost in Iraq and that won’t change. A continued and heightened presence is a resource drain and a recruiting tool for extremists. It means more blowback. In Syria, Trump will encounter resistance from Syrian forces, Hezbollah forces, Iranian forces and Russian forces. Any heightened encounter with these forces is not a victory, but a loss.
There is nothing to be won for America in any of these regional conflicts. That’s the most basic reason why Trump and America will lose as Trump commits the US more and more to these wars, unstable places and hot spots. The more that’s committed by our government to these dead ends, the more we lose. We certainly lose whatever measure of peace we now have. Killing and bombing these places and peoples doesn’t equate to victory, which isn’t even defined in such wars.
Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com.
