America has produced more than its fair share of truly ghastly political players.
While it is true that Thomas Jefferson authored the declaration of independence, which encapsulated the finer aspects of enlightenment philosophy, this rebarbative also did have children with a 15 year old slave girl — Sally Hemmings.
Rutherford Hayes, prior to becoming president of the United States, represented fugitive slaves, but this wasn’t at the forefront of his thinking when he chose to remove the federal troops from Oklahoma, thereby putting an end to reconstruction.
Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas ‘Woodrow’ Wilson paid lip service to civil rights, while pursuing aggressive foreign wars with Spain and Germany.
But these individuals pale into comparison with their successors who’ve destroyed the system by cynically manipulating it.
And this is where America’s 37th president comes in.
Richard Milhous Nixon did not instigate the Vietnam war; that dubious honour belongs to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was looking for a way of redeeming himself after the Bay of Pigs debacle.
But what ‘tricky dicky’ did do was to escalate the war in Indo-China for his own ends while embarking on the riskiest gamble on the dollar, by abandoning its convertibility to gold and letting it float freely.
Jeffrey Kass
Some will argue that his intentions were noble, but was it mere coincidence that these steps were taken at a time of great peril, when the middle-east was in turmoil and Cambodia and Vietnam were being bombed to submission?
What emerged from his cynicism was that millions of Americans emerged poorer and new life was breathed into the military industrial-complex.
Less intelligent than Nixon was George W. Bush, whose understanding of the world was as limited as his vocabulary.
Those with long enough memories will remember the footage of ‘Dubya’ struggling to name the then leader of Pakistan —Pervez Musharaff.
Framing the world into Black and white meant that the lessons of the Vietnam war was lost on the draft dodging son of the Bush dynasty and this reality gave rise to the reconfiguration of the middle-east.
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Lebanon’s polities have been irrevocably destroyed.
But the business of creating new debts by fighting new wars is simply unsustainable and this is powerfully evinced by Donald Trump’s policies of imposing punitive tariffs on friends and foes alike.
China’s inexorable economic preponderance has made the machinations of the military industrial-complex fall flat on its face and it is inconceivable that America will emerge victorious from its trade war with its biggest rival.
And this brings us to the very basis of the article: Nixon, Bush or Trump: who represents the very worst of the military industrial-complex?
Nixon opened up new channels of destruction through the Washington consensus at a time when much of the world was emerging from colonialism and Bush ran up a huge deficit with China to pay for war with Iraq.
Trump does not have the privileges of Bush and Nixon and this is also exacerbated by his extreme idiocy, which puts him above them.
The miliary industrial-complex is driven by its compulsion to expand and destroy wherever possible and it’s found a happy bedfellow in the current president.
You do not have to be a soothsayer to see that things won’t end well.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.