Red-brown alliances are just brown, an ongoing series
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Christian Parenti has a deeply embarrassing post at Sohrab Ahmari’s fascist blog in which he asserts that Donald Trump is being persecuted by the Deep State because he was opposed to “American Empire”:
While in the White House, Trump gave the ruling class massive tax cuts and sweeping deregulation, so what’s the beef? His foreign-policy heresies. To the frustration of those who benefit from it, Trump worked to unwind the American empire. Indeed, he has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.
Within a few months of his arrival in the Oval Office, it became clear that Trump’s seemingly preposterous rhetoric about ending America’s “forever wars” wasn’t a joke. Yes, he ordered a few missile and drone strikes here and there, but unlike all of his recent predecessors, he didn’t start any new wars. Indeed, he wound down numerous small wars and negotiated a peace settlement in Afghanistan, even if the dirty work of the final withdrawal fell to President Biden.
I thought the production of Our American Cousin was quite tasetful!
Civilian deaths in fact massively increased under Trump, because far from dismantling American empire he succeeded in his goal of making it more brutal:
Trump escalated the Yemen war, upped drone strikes, brought us to the brink of Iran war, conflict with China, a failed Venezuela coup, increased support for repressive clients. A partial list.
The claim that he’s being persecuted for being “anti-imperialist” is very silly. https://t.co/1KWkD9rRPJ— Matt Duss (@mattduss) April 7, 2023
The “no new wars” metric, which is a dubious characterization of the Yemen intervention in any case, is a completely meaningless metric used solely to defend Trump. In reality, civilians killed in greater numbers in conflicts he inherited are just as dead — there is no moral distinction to be made here whatsoever.
As for the question of which president has done the most to cut back on American imperialism, it is Uncle Joe Brandon, who actually ended the war in Afghanistan and grounded the drones. I will give Parenti this much — he doesn’t even pretend to think that Trump is some kind of “economic populist.” He loves him anyway because he owns the libs, hence his sad intellectual alliance with the “if we must choose between democracy and drag queen story hour, democracy must go” dude. Any form of actual socialism left Parenti’s thought long ago.