In a word: humiliation.
In the 1970s, there was Henry Kissinger. Alongside him was the growing importance of television, and the gradual breakdown of the traditional East-West Communist-Capitalist divide. Kissinger served two purposes – to create successes which President Nixon could take credit for, and to navigate the extremely complicated and confusing world of international relations during the Oil Crisis while reaching out to Communist China. Both these things were purposefully staged for television – Nixon meeting with Mao looked amazing on the evening news (while nothing of any substance was agreed), and the elder statesman Kissinger jetting around and shaking hands with the Arab leaders who cut off the oil supply to America was just the peaceful solution public opinion wanted after the carnage in Vietnam (even if the oil was still four times as expensive as before.)
But then Nixon disgraced himself in the Watergate scandal and Kissinger got to keep all the credit (and celebrity status, and his job). But another phenomenon was occurring at this time. High oil prices meant money was flowing to the petrostates such as Saudi Arabia. These countries, with their underdeveloped infrastructure, had too much money to even spend, and put it into the banks of Europe and America. With so much money to lend, the interest rate floored, sparking a temporary economic boom that was almost immediately eaten up by inflation. But many developing countries found that the time was ripe to take out low-interest loans to pay for oil imports, development schemes and nationalising their own oil reserves. One of these countries was Venezuela, which used their loan money to nationalise the oil and paid off the loan using the proceeds from oil production.
Henry Kissinger did nothing about this, and indeed it is debateable whether he even knew what impacts that oil nationalisation might have on American interests, or if he knew much about economics.
It was a good time to be a petrostate, and high oil prices kept the stagnating economies of the Eastern Block afloat (as the USSR provided cut-price fossil fuels while exporting the rest) until 1975 , when Leonid Brezhnev demanded that his puppet states pay full price for the oil the Soviet Union supplied. With no choice but to comply, the economies of the Warsaw Pact entered a decline that would eventually result in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But in that year, 1975, American conservatism was in a crisis. This crisis was not based on facts (the USA was the most developed country with the largest economy and military and strongest allies on earth), but rather on feelings. The American economy was stagnating. The Soviet economy was flourishing and projected to overtake the USA by 2010. Their Republican president, Gerald Ford was irrevocably tarnished by his association with Watergate and his failure to stop Saigon from falling. In fact, he openly admitted that “The State of the Union, is not good.” It shouldn’t escape the reader that these conservatives linked their own misfortunes to America’s stagnation.
These conservatives rallied around California Governor Ronald Reagan, who challenged Ford for the Republican nomination for President in 1976, winning nearly half the votes in the primary election. In response, Ford ditched his moderate vice-president, demoted Henry Kissinger, installed George H.W. Bush as the head of the CIA and Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defence. Moderate Republicanism was dead. America rewarded him for his cowardice by electing the Democratic Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s human rights-based approach was widely praised but swiftly abandoned. It didn’t look good on television. Carter’s decision to give the Panama Canal to Panama was criticised as weak. His anti-apartheid stances and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty were tarred as letting the Communists win. This criticism got to him, and he started taking more hawkish stances, to the point where he was probably more assertive than Ford. He supported dictators such as Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia and Marcos in the Philippines. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, he sent arms to Pakistan, who gave them to Afghan “freedom fighters”, who later turned out to be the Taliban. The 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicuaragua led many conservatives to believe that Latin America couldn’t be trusted with democracy, and therefore backing dictators in the region was the path forward. His success at the Camp David peace accords, despite being a boon to US interests, was criticised from the right as being too soft on Egypt, and from the left as being too soft on Israel. Margeret Thatcher, a neoconservative in the mould of Reagan, sidelined Carter when negotiating peace between the warring factions of Rhodesia. To be ignored by an inferior ally, a Reaganite, a woman – it was humiliating.
The thing is this. Carter never worked out a way to sell his policies, especially his foreign policy, on TV. He made mistakes, but everyone does that. The problem is that building a genuine post-colonial international order, as was emerging during the 1970s by necessity requires making sacrifices, compromise and long, winding explanations to the American public to secure a leading position and international respect. And it was precisely those things which the American public didn’t want to hear.
In 1973, Americans read newspapers. By 1979, they watched TV. TV condensed the complicated and frustrating truth into half an hour’s worth of a nice good-versus-evil story that emphasised emotion over hard facts. America was, of course, the good guys, while the people who opposed America were the bad guys. While this might come across as simplistic and reductive, it is the only way to explain the American reaction to the following events.
The problem came when a new movement did not fit into the Manichean narrative. The revolutionary conservative Islamists of the 1979 Iranian revolution detested Soviet communism just as much as they loathed American imperialism. They had also overthrown the very pro-American Shah Reza Pahlavi, who most Americans knew almost nothing about beyond his lavish parties, his nation’s stability, his friendliness with America and Iran’s large oil and gas reserves. The American government did not see any problems with his leadership and praised it as “an island of stability.” And yet, he was overthrown, and it would take a lot longer than a half-hour TV show to explain why. When Iran cut off the oil, the American economy stagnating, and anger exploded. This anger only intensified when zealous students held the US embassy hostage, and Carter’s attempts to rescue them failed. Protests were organised, demanding an invasion of Iran. No less than seven songs were released, singing Bomb Iran over the Beach Boys’ song Barbara Ann. To conservatives, Carter simply looked very, very weak. He would not go on a punitive expedition – as other presidents might – against the anti-imperialists in Iran. But to leftists, the response to the Iranian Revolution left them with the feeling that America would never change, and would continue supporting dictators and intervening, no matter what the President said about human rights.
And the rest of America watched on TV, every night, as America was humiliated by people of colour whose motivations and goals they didn’t understand who had seemingly been empowered by the liberals in the government. They had been through this before in the 1960s, when the radical movement started to get violent. Ronald Reagan had got his start in politics in those times, fearmongering about violent criminals and anti-war activists to suburbanites. To moderates and conservatives, Reagan gave voice to their rage, their anger.
They did not want to negotiate, they did not want to make friends, they did not want to take a leading role in a more equitable world of self-determination.
They wanted revenge. They wanted their government to enact the necessary violence to put the third world peoples back in their rightful place. They wanted to Make America Great Again.
Ronald Reagan won almost every state.
He got off to a good start when Iran released the hostages immediately after his inauguration, which immediately validated Reaganite foreign policy in the eyes of conservatives – merely by behaving tough on TV, he had defeated the Iranians into releasing the hostages. But it also validated the Iranian Islamists in the eyes of many leftists as they had taken on the American Empire – and won, deposing President Carter.
Reagan couldn’t roll back decolonisation. He couldn’t take back the oil. But he could give the impression of doing so.
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to take some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall.”
- Michael Ledeen, National Security Adviser.
Such a course of action did not make America many friends – but it did satisfy the desire for revenge and end the feelings of humiliation many conservatives felt.
The Reagan foreign policy – and to an extent domestic policy as well – was made for TV, far more than Nixon and Kissinger had ever staged it. Rather than identifying American interests and finding out a way to work towards them, thereby generating media approval, every action was sent through focus groups, every decision usually leaked to the media, and every staff member was using their connections to influence policy. So, Reagan looked excellent on TV and is generally given credit for ending the Cold War by many Americans today.
He was the sort of bold action hero president that America was looking for. When the impossibly complicated Lebanese Civil War that America had gotten entangled with threatened to reach the front pages, America invaded Grenada, simply because it was Communist, and because they could. When over 200 American soldiers were killed in the Beirut Barracks Bombing, it barely made the news, but when it did, America shelled Beirut in retaliation. When Congress blocked Reagan from funding the drug-dealing, human-rights-abusing Contras in Nicuaragua, Reagan bent over backwards to continue supplying them, by soliciting private donations and concocting a bizarre backhanded deal with Iran. When a bomb went off in a West Berlin nightclub, Reagan blamed Libya, and tried to bomb Muammar Gaddafi himself.
It may have been illegal under international law, and almost every UN country condemned it, but so what? They were just a bunch of liberal elitists who were jealous American greatness. And their president Ronald Reagan, sticking up for the real Americans.
And this mindset spread to the domestic sphere as well. There is an argument to be made here that the Reagan administration treated minorities and the poor in the same way that Reagan treated third world countries – as uppity protestors who should be punished for opposing American power. Civil rights, especially for people of colour, were hollowed out, especially as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division began to prosecute authorities for integrating institutions too fast. The Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed generally popular amendment to the constitution guaranteeing equal rights between women and men, was abandoned. Any attempts to rein in police brutality were abandoned, and the War on Drugs almost explicitly target black people with hugely increased penalties while Reagan used racist dogwhistles. He promised to protect the south against “Yankee incursions.” He talked of “young bucks” and “welfare queens.” He advocated for States’ Rights. He almost deliberately ignored the AIDS crisis, almost entirely because it mostly affected minorities. Welfare payments were cut and made harder to access. Public housing initiatives were gutted. Poor farmers were often reduced to tenancy or even sharecropping thanks to the administration’s “Get Big or Get Out” policy.
What did Reagan care? They didn’t vote for him. The people who did were overjoyed. Finally, a President who would show where those ****** ****** bums where they belonged. They weren’t Real Americans.
While Reagan’s policies did lead to a boom, this boom (contrary to what you might have heard), largely arose as a result of the fall in oil prices, increased military deficit spending, cutting taxes and the deregulation of financial markets. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union declined due to said fall, and Reagan spotted an opportunity. By opening up to the Soviets, Reagan could claim that he was forcing them to the negotiation table through his escalation of the Cold War, and his insistence that the Soviets didn’t need to be contained – but destroyed. He repeatedly met with Gorbachev and travelled to Moscow repeatedly. At the same time, he demanded, in a moment made for TV, “Mr. Gorbachev – Tear Down This Wall!”
Two years later, and by no fault of his own, the wall was torn down.
Two years later, and by no fault of his own, the wall was torn down.
The end of the Cold War brought a new and uncertain time for the United States. On one hand, America had defeated their old rivals for the final time, and the threat of nuclear annihilation never seemed further away. On the other hand, there were no superpowers left to struggle against, no way a conservative could accuse their opponents of being tough on communism.
Reagan was out of power, but his more cautious vice president, George H. W. Bush was in office. America was still spending $700 billion each year on the military, but few people really knew who it was supposed to fight. Cutting the military budget would mean having a fight with Congress, and Bush and Clinton were never very powerful in that area. As such, there was no money in the budget to support the post-Soviet states in their transition to capitalist democracies, leading to the “vicious nineties.”
Bush expanded NATO eastwards but failed to properly include or support the new Russian government in the post-Soviet settlement, leading to resentments in Russia, and a general feeling that they could not trust America either. Bush also continued his predecessors policy of invading countries until the bloodlust died down, with the well-publicised Operation Just Cause in Panama, and the First Gulf War in Iraq. Officially, the former was to stop drug trafficking, and the latter to stop countries from changing borders by force.
But in the new world, where America had complete power over the planet and the extreme hawkishness of neo-conservatism was dying out, whoever was left was still angry. Bush didn’t sell his invasions right. He justified them, but really it revived feelings of humiliation. Everyone knew that these were very cynical wars designed to keep the world economy stable by protecting the Panama Canal and keeping world oil prices down, but to the neoconservatives left, Bush’s grovelling to the liberal international order smelt of the same weakness of Ford, and a denial of American exceptionalism.
Conservatives would have to wait, however, as America replaced Bush with Bill Clinton, who, like the other moderate Southern Governor before him, had good intentions but didn’t quite have the acumen to achieve it. But Clinton didn’t quite care about foreign policy, once stating that “foreign policy is not what I came here to do.” He, like hundreds of millions of Americans, only wanted America to look good on TV, and to that end, emphasised the process of negotiation and reconciliation within the rising liberal international order as the foundations of American power. The United Nations, International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, World Trade Organisation, World Bank and International Monetary Fund were supported by America and the post-Communist countries as the basis of a global, peaceful, American-led order that still left room for smaller nations to be heard. If Reagan brought wars, then Clinton would bring peace. America helped bring about negotiated settlements in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the settlement between Israel and Palestine failed, it came the closest to succeeding it will likely ever be.
Conservatives, out of power and off the leash from supporting their own president, could go all out on criticising Clinton on every foreign policy decision he made, every minor slip up and out-of-context quote was seized upon and used to evoke the same rage and humiliation that conservatives felt. Clinton resorted to the traditional Republican policy of intervention (but only when popular) – only this time, he very rarely if ever put “boots on the ground”, choosing to bomb countries such as Sudan, Iraq and finally, Serbia. However, each time, Clinton made sure to consult, advice, cajole and convince his allies to support his agenda, promoting an American-led liberal system that was popular beyond the United States and cheaper to maintain. It did have some of it’s own problems, such as Clinton’s biggest failure, inaction during the Rwandan genocide, caused due to French resistance.
Conservatives returned to power in 2000 under George W. Bush. W. was the first president to have grown up inculcated in these feelings of anger and humiliation during the 1970s, and the ensuing War on Terror reflects it quite well. The 9/11 terrorist attack led to skyrocketing support for neoconservatism as the desire for revenge overcame the American public. Neoconservatives themselves sensed they had been given free rein and could accomplish anything they wished against the newly defined “Axis of Evil.”
America’s enemies did not form any sort of coherent bloc, the defined Axis of Evil being composed of an Islamic theocracy, two Communist dictatorships and three Arab-nationalist dictatorships. The only thing that really united them is that they were anti-American, and therefore they were targets upon which Bush and his neoconservative friends could take revenge for 9/11. While Iraq may not have anything to do with 9/11, that didn’t stop Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from trying to invade what seemed like the weakest target in the Axis of Evil and taking down a dictator that Bush Sr. didn’t.
The issue was that such a war was likely to be unpopular, internationally at least. In order to reconcile neo-conservative hawkish bloodlust with the liberal order, the United States falsified information that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and presented this to the international order at the UN, before US withdrew the resolution to avoid the humiliation of defeat. The USA, with their allies in the UK, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq in 2003. The Iraqi government fell quickly, and the execution of Saddam Hussein should have provided a satisfying conclusion to the conservatives.
However, Iraq was deliberately made to be the centrepiece of the neoconservative programme. The new Iraqi government was a democracy, but the Americans refused to allow it any control over the economy, making it effectively toothless and dependent on more American advisors and aid, robbing it of legitimacy. The entire Iraqi army and most of the civil servants were laid off without any plans for what they were supposed to do, increasing violence. Artefacts began to disappear from museums, with a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh re-emerging in the “Museum of the Bible” in America a few years later. The CIA set up a network of extrajudicial “black sites” by which suspected terrorists could have information tortured out of them outside of the prying eyes of journalists and international law. Of course, it emerged that many of these suspected terrorists were innocent and turned in due to local grudges, or just for the money. Contracts for rebuilding Iraq were farmed out to well-connected American firms, while roles overseeing these contracts were also given to well-connected American firms. The Bechtel corporation was given $5 billion to rebuild the Iraqi electrical grid, but engineers stated that “if anything, the situation is worse than before they arrived.” The neoconservatives in the heavily fortified “Green Zone” in Baghdad seemed genuinely surprised when things fell apart.
With an absolute failure of governance, militias moved in to fill the vacuum, and Iraq slid into a civil war that America couldn’t afford the political cost of sending enough troops to contain. The failure to rebuild Iraq ended up at a (conservative estimate) of two trillion dollars.
The failure in Iraq could be directly attributed to the bloodlust and hardline neo-conservativism of the Bush administration, and most Americans now remember opposing the war, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, even when most Americans actually supported all of them at the time.
However, (and the Iraq war tends to lend itself quite naturally to conspiracy), one might question whether this wasn’t the intended outcome. Conservatives wanted to punish Iraq, and they did. Their ideology failed in rebuilding it, and in justifiying it, and that is the main reason why neoconservatism has experienced a rapid decline in popularity, and the current isolationist wave among Americans.
The election of Barack Obama amid the ruins of the financial crisis seemingly brought a new dawn to American politics. Able to straddle the balance between moderates and progressives, most people attached hopes to him that he didn’t want to or couldn’t fulfil. Anti-American movements had seen a global wave of support since 2003, and many progressives at home believed that the whole kit and caboodle of American foreign policy might be restructured around a less interventionist and more democratic framework. Their high hopes were sorely disappointed as Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay, continued to supply Saudi Arabia and Israel with weapons, did not end the surveillance PATRIOT Act and continued to ride roughshod over the sovereignty of many nations using drone strikes. These failures radicalised many people who had previously been against the Iraq War into a more general anti-Western and anti-liberal foreign policy that began to attract disaffected conservatives as well.
In addition, as the Arab Spring unleashed pro-democracy movements across the Middle East, some groups (especially the Russian, Chinese and Iranian governments), began to believe that America was orchestrating these protests through the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy to create artificial democracies that were merely puppets for American interests. This “Colour Revolution Theory”, as it is known, holds that just about every popular uprising since the millennium was not real, that the millions of protestors were paid by the CIA and George Soros (antisemitism also forming a key part of this theory) and all organised by the local American embassy. Aside from the fact that none of it was true, and in fact in almost all these revolutions resulted in even more authoritarian governments, it did appeal to many conservatives, especially authoritarian conservatives around the world.
To the people who were discontented with liberalism, to the people who felt that the UN was holding their nation back, to the people left unemployed by free trade agreements, to the disaffected anti-war protestors, this was the movement they were looking for. The global isolationist movement began to descend into conspiracy theories. The USA was run by socially progressive globalist liberal bankers who manipulated wars and revolutions to their advantage, and it was the duty of strongmen to resist them. The liberal institutions were only holding America back. And this hatred of liberalism, morphed into a feeling of rage into the system that elected the status quo and spread it’s poison across the globe. Not capitalism, for of course communism had long been discredited.
They began to hate democracy. Democracy could not be real. It could only be imposed from a shadowy network of elites desperate to impose their progressive agenda on the Real Americans. And now, the Real Russians, the Real Hungarians, the Real Turks.
And this feeling was sold by authoritarian strongmen, who loudly claimed to be anti-western. Victor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, the Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran, and Xi Jinping in China. Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that George Soros was at the helm of an antisemitic plot to overthrow the State of Israel. Talk show hosts such as Glenn Beck wilfully confused democracy with progressivism and sold it to a hungry audience now convinced that the American liberal elite was now plotting a colour revolution to overthrow itself.
This insane isolationist ideology was sold on Fox News, Twitter, Facebook and MSNBC by producers who should have known better, further boosting the prominence of the alt-right. By 2016, there was a lot to be angry about. Obama had not delivered on his promise of transformation, or even on hope. Hillary Clinton was the architect of his foreign failings, as Secretary of State. In response, the Republican Party, split between 14 candidates, chose Donald Trump, who successfully wielded the feelings of anger and humiliation at the elites to “win” the 2016 election. (Clinton did win a majority of votes, but lost the electoral college.)
Donald Trump opposed the invasion of Iraq. He loudly declaimed about his reluctance to involve America in forever wars. He refused to take the sort of bold short wars to appease the neoconservatives but still appealed to them by his toughness.
Now, of course, Donald Trump was not the isolationist that many wanted him to be. He satisfied the Putinite end of the movement with his authoritarianism and isolationist rhetoric. But there was also a significant Reaganite neoconservatism that ran through him, as he grew up in the era of malaise, and sympathised with his arguments and methods, namely: the idea that some ethnic groups “aren’t ready for democracy”, ambient “toughness” and the overwhelming desire to look good on TV. The one thing Trump always avoided was putting boots on the ground, since he thought that would always lead to a “forever war.”
In the hideously complicated Syrian Civil War, Obama had refused to intervene, even blocking a French-led assassination team from killing Assad. The violence in Syria spilled out onto TV and social media and meant that the West had to do something. But, seeing as Iraq and Libya had turned into utter chaos after democracy, this led many Western nations to believe that the stability of dictatorship in the Middle East might be preferable to the violence of democracy. To conservatives, the Arab Spring was proof that the Arabs couldn’t be trusted with democracy, as they would always pick radical Islamism.
Donald Trump thought that his ambient toughness would prevent global leaders from taking actions that looked bad on TV. To precisely one person’s surprise, most people saw him as an incompetent moron who wouldn’t mind a few human rights abuses. When Bashar-al-Assad started to use chemical weapons on his civilian opponents, Donald Trump demanded that the CIA assassinate Assad. The Secretary of State quietly ignored the order until Trump forgot about it. Then Assad kept attacking civilians, and Trump launched missiles into Syria. This provoked a storm of anti-Trump posts from MAGA and Russian-aligned social media accounts that pushed Trump into an isolationist mood again. So, he withdrew troops from Northern Syria, which left the Kurdish forces left out to dry between Turkey and ISIS. Media coverage focused on the heroic actions of the Rojavans in fighting ISIS and blamed Trump for withdrawing troops on the grounds that it (correctly) strengthened ISIS and Assad’s hand. Trump looked bad on TV. So, Trump sent some troops back in, but this made him look indecisive, but then COVID hit and distracted everyone and after that Trump was out of office. Impressively, by a series of contradictory moves, Trump had managed to make himself look weak, strengthen Assad’s hand and look bad on TV. It showed that the Reagan approach of goodies vs. baddies didn’t work in the increasingly complex world of today, and that changing your mind didn’t work.
In theatre after theatre, in conflict after conflict, from Qatar to Libya to Yemen to Afghanistan to Israel and Palestine, Trump managed to weaken American interests, act contradictorily and look bad on TV and social media.
The only action that resembles anywhere near success was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump negotiated a peace settlement directly with the Taliban, with the withdrawal of American forces in 2021. However, after Trump lost the 2020 elections, but before Joe Biden was sworn in, Trump purged the Department of Defence of all the people tasked with organising the withdrawal from Afghanistan, intentionally to put Biden in a difficult position. If he stayed fighting, then he looked like a warmonger. If he withdrew, then tens of thousands of Afghans who supported the Western Alliance would be subject to brutal reprisals. Biden chose the latter.
But this intentional sabotaging of policy to make your opponents look bad will leave a nasty and long-lasting scar upon US politics and society as future politicians are going to look to Trump to think how to win. In the past, such acts might be exposed by television journalists. Today, barely anyone cares, because while in 2010 Americans watched TV, by 2016, they used social media. Social media distils facts, even dumbed-down facts, into pure emotion, and plays on pathos to reinforce what we already believe. By reframing politics not as facts or decisions over policy, but instead as feelings, social media made it simultaneously much more difficult to change anyone’s minds and reduced politicians down to, for lack of a better word, their vibes. This creates widespread anger, because the opposition now seems far more unreasonable, and this anger often radicalises people.
Now, a short break.
Of all the revolutions of the 2010s, of all the chaos and protests, how many of them actually resulted in a pro-western democracy?
Just one: in 2014 in Ukraine. To boot, there was almost zero evidence of American involvement – the American ambassador had even handed out sandwiches to the pro-Yanukovich police. It was a true, organic, pro-western democratic, liberal and even quite progressive revolution.
And Russia could not stand it. There had to be instability, CIA trickery, an unpopular government that they could take advantage of. An organic democracy should not, could not, must not be allowed to exist. They annexed the Crimea, the first step in lighting the fuse on a seemingly unstable Ukraine which would undoubtedly start a civil war, and Russia could sweep in and finish off the rest. But no civil war started, and democracy was strengthened. Then Russia intervened on the side of an anti-government insurrection in Luhansk and Donetsk, before centralising control over them, before finally fully invading in February 2022.
If the desire for democracy, and by extension democracy itself is not real, and in fact is all CIA globalist machinations in backrooms as Putin and Trump and the rest of the isolationists would have you believe, then opposing intervention in Syria to stop Assad murdering so many people moves from being a morally questionable idea to a noble stand against American imperialism.
There is just one hole in that narrative (which favours Russia heavily), and that hole is Ukraine. Putin successfully framed the war as this question: Is it possible for ordinary people to go up against entrenched power, and win?
Only, of course, both sides believe this narrative to be true, to want it to be true. Putin (and to a lesser extent, Trump) believes that he is fighting the American globalist deep state hellbent on toppling him from power via a colour revolution. The Ukrainians and the Europeans, believe the more direct truth that they are fighting an oligarchical dictatorship hellbent on destroying their democracy. This is the reason why neither side really wants to back down, why Putin will continually reject any peace deal – because no peace deal will be enough to convince the peoples of the world that democracy is not desirable.
He had far more success on that front via propaganda spread by that very same social media that elected Donald Trump, again.
Joe Biden, for his part, failed to provide an alternative to any of this or the status quo, and continued the policies of Donald Trump – from keeping up a trade war with China, to only tentatively supporting Ukraine, to not intervening in Syria. Only, of course, Biden had the smarts to be consistent and not say stupid things, at least for a while.
Foreign policy then suddenly came home to roost with the War in Ukraine’s sudden massive escalation in 2022, which was largely uniting – most Americans supported far more extensive aid for Ukraine – and then the far, far more divisive War in Gaza. America’s extensive support for the Israeli government suddenly seemed another morally fraught position as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom appeared to be innocent civilians, were killed in air strikes, food blockades and gunfire. The divide in Israeli society mirrored that in America. After experiencing a direct moment of extreme humiliation on October 7th, the feelings of anger and hatred boiled over into a general desire for revenge.
Only, of course, Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionist desire for further territorial expansion saw the takeover of Gaza and the removal of the 2 million people in it as a desirable goal, and published plans for what they would do afterwards.
American progressives, most people around the world, the International Court of Justice and the UN decided that Israel was committing a genocide. American conservatives, the State of Israel, most Western governments and Joe Biden decided that they were not. Both sides protested accordingly. Societies tore themselves apart over it.
In reality, there was only one person who could stop the war in Gaza, and that man was Bunyamin Netanyahu. But the desire to see the killings end, and the desire for peace, spread wide. Even if that desire only arose from not wanting to see more people die on television and Twitter.
In that context, Donald Trump’s claim that
“I will end every single international crisis that started under the Biden administration”
seems a bit less laughable. For Donald Trump believes in colour revolution theory too. He really seems to believe that America can bring about outcomes to its liking around the world via simple actions, and that he can use this to destroy the international liberal order at home and abroad.
And that urge, to believe in and to unleash American power, is what propelled Donald Trump’s return to the White House. On his return, Trump enacted policies generally aimed at enacting revenge upon his enemies, who he and many conservatives believed were destroying the West, usually often linked to a different set of racist conspiracy theories. After a year of punishing people for existing, Trump’s opening moves on the world stage was tariffs.
Among many of Donald Trump’s friends and partners who have helped build his oligarchy, the idea of tariffs floated around to replace the lost revenue from a tax break for the rich. Instead, as experts predicted, the imposition of blanket tariffs against just about every country on earth except Russia and Belarus nowhere near covered the money lost from taxing the rich and only served to harm the American economy, put further pressure on consumers and annoy just about everyone. A secondary initiative under Elon Musk to reduce government spending on both domestic and foreign aid did neither, with the exception of getting lots of people killed.
It is estimated that Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID have already killed over a hundred thousand people and saved just six billion dollars.
On the promise of peace, Trump did seriously negotiate peace between Israel and Hamas, and between Russia and Ukraine. Russia rejected peace each time, and both sides accused each other of breaking the ceasefire in Gaza. Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for the successive failures of peace deals. America also deliberately inserted itself into peace treaties that had nothing to do with it, from the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, the Rwanda-DRC war, a brief set of border wars between Cambodia and Thailand, and India and Pakistan.
Trump also took the time to appease his domestic followers and oligarchic supporters –he sent $20 billion to the “anarcho-capitalist” administration of Javier Milei in Argentina to support their economy, pleasing those who wanted Trump to lower taxes on the wealthy even more. To appease his white supremacist supporters – especially Elon Musk – Donald Trump claimed that there was a genocide being conducted on White South Africans – a statement almost all White South Africans disagreed with – and allowed all of them to be resettled in the US. To this day, less than a hundred of them have taken up the offer. Trump also blamed China, Mexico, Canada and Venezuela for smuggling drugs into America, and started bombing “drug vessels”, most of which turned out to be fishermen. Christian fundamentalists were happy when Trump sent missiles into northern Nigeria to fight ISIS (the religious conflict there is widely known within Christian circles, and framed as Christian persecution, but not so much beyond them.) And, in an entirely pointless act of nationalism, he “officially” renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Of course, Trump also set about threatening to invade or annex Canada, Panama, Greenland and Mexico. The point of these threats is entirely domestic. It is to prove to the nationalists that America is still fighting, ever bolder than before, to avenge the mistakes and humiliations of days gone by. And to prove that progressive democracy cannot be real.
Some of these threats were entirely self-defeating. By threatening to invade Canada, Trump almost certainly ensured that the 2025 federal election went to Mark Carney’s unpopular Liberal party, instead of what could have been a key ally in Pierre Poilievre.
And then, Trump took the next big step.
Forget pushing a country up against the wall every ten years – Donald Trump started a new war each month in 2026.
The Marines kidnapped the President of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, on the grounds that he was smuggling drugs. Of course, Trump took the time to emphasise that the war was for Venezuela’s oil reserves, at the exact time that the State Department tried to claim that it was to overturn the rigged results of the 2022 elections. And yet, the vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in, and life continued under Venezuelan socialism as usual, while Trump forgot about it.
As you should know by now, this war was really about looking good on TV – it was designed to look like a movie, and it reminded conservatives and nationalists of American greatness, while also enacting the neoconservative’s dream of overthrowing Venezuela’s socialist government. It brought the isolationists and neoconservatives together.
Next, came the even stupider war. Trump spent most of February 2026 threatening to invade Greenland – despite the fact that Greenland was already an American ally, that it allowed US forces to do whatever they wanted in Greenland and extract as many resources as America wanted. European leaders fretted and worried, which pleased most American nationalists, as it confirmed their ideas about Europeans being weak, and their ideas linking social progressivism and their lack of strength on the world stage*. Such a threat wouldn’t work against one of America’s usual enemies, as they are used to American offensive action and can safely continue as usual, but against Europe it did, since allies by necessity are vulnerable to being stabbed in the back.
The expansion of Trumpist regimes to Europe is a key priority of the Trump administration, with national security documents pointing to overblown fears over mass immigration to Europe, with nary a mention of Russia and China’s ambitions, which would surely be a more direct concern. The fears over mass immigration are a subset of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that holds that the same group of globalist elites are trying to replace all white people with multiracial immigrants, thereby diluting the ethnic purity of many “white” countries. Of course, this sounds like something the Nazis would say, which is why Elon Musk has said it was true.
Finally, America attacked the place that started it all off. The place that stood up to American-backed dictatorship and won. The place where Campism goes to die. The place that inspired me to write this essay.
The Islamic Republic of Iran.
It was a war too big to be contained. Within hours, Iran had struck at American bases and civilian targets throughout the Middle East. America killed the Ayatollah Khamenei and blew up a school. According to Trump, that should have been that. But Iran proved that the option to militarily influence them was never real. The Iranians blockaded the Straits of Hormuz, where a good 25% of the world’s oil trade went through. Oil prices hit over $100 dollars a barrel, potentially destabilising the American economy, and forcing Trump and the Iranians to continue the war to this day.
The thing underlying these wars is again, the belief in colour revolution theory. To let European social democracy flower, to leave Venezuelan socialism alone, to continue tolerating the existence of the Islamic Republic, is to concede to the liberals that other countries have a right to choose their own forms of government beyond the very narrow, conspiracy-theory and racism driven American and Russian one.
To be independent. To go up against entrenched power and win.
This is what Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bunyamin Netanyahu, Muhammad Bin Salman and probably Xi Jinping as well are fighting against.
However, all these governments are tremendously unpopular. Most people oppose these wars. The very notion behind denying the reality of democracy is because democracy is too popular. In addition, many governments around the world are attempting to reinforce the liberal and decolonial international order, and those that aren’t are losing their popularity fast. Even in America itself, the victories of even open socialists gives me hope that a new alternative to neoliberalism that isn’t Donald Trump will emerge.
But if that ending is too optimistic for you, then how about this.
The government of China appears to have wholeheartedly embraced colour revolution theory. While we cannot know the true intentions of the Central Committee, the theory does seem perfectly poised to play on more conservative members of Chinese society, such as most of the elderly members of the government. China officially sees the period of Western exploitation, invasion and civil war between the First Opium War and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China as it’s Century of Humiliation. Officially being communist (and therefore in favour of fighting for The People), while also being in practice an oligarchy (and therefore in favour of directing the people’s anger away from the rich), and a dictatorship (and therefore against democracy). The Chinese government officially seeks to reclaim Taiwan (which would most likely start World War Three), but also all territory lost in the Century of Humiliation – Mongolia, the Russian lands of Zheltorossoyia, Aksai Chin and Arunchadal Pradesh in India, and influence over Vietnam. Pro-Chinese media is already broadcasting colour revolution theory items, while Xi himself has spoken of the need to protect China from such a colour revolution.
In the end, in the list of successes of the modern anti-war movement, starting the wars in Ukraine and Iran may just be the shortest of footnotes in a very, very long chapter of history.
*These people may want to look up France’s actions in Africa.