Heads in the sand

If there's a theme, a kind of leitmotif, running through right-wing attitudes today, I'd call it "denial".

Consider just the last few days' emissions from our domestic Dear Leader. He summarily ordered the removal of U.S. forces from Syria — via tweet, no less, instead of a formal announcement. (If tweets are to be treated as official policy pronouncements by this administration, I foresee an awkward time for it in the many lawsuits against it winding their way through the courts.) He also said he wants to deport convicted criminals of Vietnamese descent to Vietnam despite those persons having lived in the U.S. for decades (not to mention that most fled here in the wake of South Vietnam's defeat, justly fearing for their lives). And our domestic DL did a whiplash-inducing about-face on the budget deal negotiated earlier in the week, moving from an expressed willingness to sign the continuing resolution that would have kept the government funded into the new year to declaring that he would veto any budget that did not include $5 billion of funding for his border wall.

In Syria, the U.S. and its allies have relied heavily on Kurdish forces to conduct ground operations against ISIS. Turkey's autocrat, Erdogan, regards the Kurds as terrorists for their stubborn demands for autonomy. He wishes to extirpate them. Only the U.S. military presence has kept him from acting on that desire.

The U.S. propped up the South Vietnamese government for years. It was simple fairness to allow South Vietnamese who feared for their lives under the invading Communists to emigrate to the U.S. Now those same former allies are under threat from Trump's latest xenophobic impulses.

The inescapable takeaway for anybody contemplating asking the U.S. for help is, don't. The U.S. under Trump is not to be trusted to live up to past commitments, or to give even the slightest damn about friendship and alliance.

Meanwhile, the Trumpian crusade to build the border wall has renewed energy because enough right-wing pundits and politicos made enough of a stink to threaten our domestic Dear Leader in the only way that counts: they said that failing to fund the wall would cost him a second term. How does this relate to the prior two crises? It's another example of the simplistic thinking that marks so much of right-wing attitudes toward the world today.

Simply put, the right would like to pretend that the rest of the world can be walled off — hidden from our sight and excluded from our consideration. We can pull our troops out from other countries and withdraw into Fortress America if only we build that southern wall high enough and put enough Border Patrol guards there. (No wall for the northern border? Could that be because Canada is regarded as largely a white country, in sharp contrast to Mexico and points south? Perish the racist thought.)

In the short term, the insistence on funding the wall will shut down part of the government. That, I suspect, doesn't bother a lot of our domestic Dear Leader's supporters because they tend to have bought into the Reaganesque formulation that government is the problem. In the long run, though, I hope they'll someday have to confront a few facts on the ground:

• Most of the folks who actually live near the border aren't enthusiastic about a wall. They disapprove of illegal immigration but they understand, in a way a lot of wall-boosters don't, that a hard border will create hardships for real and innocent people. Some of those people, incidentally, will be American citizens whose land will be seized to build the wall. This also happened during Bush 43's administration, though it got little attention.
• A wall will block only the least sophisticated and least dangerous intruders. The truly motivated and well-financed — in other words, organized crime — will find ways around it.
• Illegal immigrants do a lot of crucial work, especially in the agricultural sector. If their numbers are significantly and suddenly reduced, the knock-on effects will be significant and likely include unexpected fallout, much as Trump's haphazard use of tariffs has.

This country has flirted with isolationism before. Until the twentieth century it was pretty much the default orientation of the average citizen, in fact, and although it was deeply hypocritical (virtually every white American can trace his or her ancestry to a once-despised immigrant group), it didn't much matter because the oceans were terrific natural defenses against a lot of troubles. In the last century, though, isolationism has proven a misguided attitude at best. We've had enough reminders — Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, the 11 December 2001 attacks — of our vulnerability to the world's travails that nobody should think that we can ignore the rest of the planet.

And yet that's what the right wing would have us do. Wall ourselves off and disentangle ourselves from our honorable obligations, they say, and the nation will be fine.

No. No, we won't be fine.

Only a half-wit could imagine that we can dictate our relationship, or lack thereof, to the rest of the world. Well, only a half-wit or a liar. In our domestic Dear Leader, we have both.

Elections have consequences. A lot of us hoped we could contain the ones from 2016 via sheer bureaucratic inertia and the courts, and to a large extent both have worked. However, in foreign affairs the president has virtually unfettered authority short of war. We're just now seeing how far our domestic Dear Leader will use that authority to throw red meat to his supporters.

If a significant number of those supporters understand the dangers of sticking our heads in the sand, I haven't seen it.

Someday, maybe even sooner than we imagine, another president will attempt to undo the damage of this presidency, to repair the frayed links between the U.S. and its allies. But it will be too late for the Kurds slaughtered by the Turkish military, or the Vietnamese-Americans deported to a homeland they don't remember and that doesn't want them back. A rapprochement with Mexico and Latin America will be difficult with a forbidding wall rising out of the desert Southwest reminding everyone of the xenophobic streak that runs through the American body politic.

What we will not be able to recapture for decades, if not generations, is the trust of those who would like to be our allies. They will not soon forget how quickly we turned our backs on them by electing our domestic Dear Leader. They will not forget how readily we discarded allies like the Kurds and the onetime South Vietnamese when it suited our xenophobic impulses.

The understandable mistrust of the U.S. will haunt us for a long, long time to come. Yet our domestic Dear Leader's supporters have preemptively stuck their heads in the sand, refusing to see the consequences of his reckless pandering to their basest impulses.

I only hope they — or more likely, their children — come to see their foolishness and simplemindedness someday.