Trump est-il l’Ant\u00e9christ avec lequel nous avons rendez-vous ? C’est une hypoth\u00e8se int\u00e9ressante, \u00e9crite avec une ironie fatigu\u00e9e et un brin de \u00ab\u00a0apr\u00e8s tout pourquoi pas ?\u00a0\u00bb, qui couronne le texte de Danny Sjursen sur le site TomDispatch.com <\/em>de Tom Engelhardt. Dans tous les cas, Trump poss\u00e8de l’instrument pour h\u00e2ter la Fin des Temps, c’est-\u00e0-dire \u00ab\u00a0The American Chaos Machine<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb que repr\u00e9sente l’appareil militaire des USA tel qu’il est employ\u00e9 depuis 2001 et 9\/11. C’en est au point où Sjursen choisit comme sous-titre de sa conclusion, selon notre traduction, « La Fin des Temps comme politique \u00e9trang\u00e8re<\/em> ». Cette conclusion, selon nous, vaut citation apr\u00e8s un effort de traduction et d’adaptation facilit\u00e9 par DeepL.com<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n « Tout cela soul\u00e8ve une autre question troublante : et si le chaos sem\u00e9 par cette administration s’av\u00e9rait \u00eatre une fin en soi, une fin qui s’accorde avec les fantasmes mill\u00e9naristes de certaines factions de la droite chr\u00e9tienne r\u00e9publicaine ? Apr\u00e8s tout, plusieurs personnalit\u00e9s de l’\u00e9quipe Trump, – notamment le secr\u00e9taire d’État Mike Pompeo et le vice-pr\u00e9sident Mike Pence, – consid\u00e8rent explicitement le Moyen-Orient selon la vision chr\u00e9tienne-\u00e9vang\u00e9liste. Comme un pourcentage inqui\u00e9tant de 73 % des \u00e9vang\u00e9listes (soit 20 % de la population am\u00e9ricaine), Pompeo et Pence pensent que le Rapture<\/a>(c’est-\u00e0-dire la fin du monde proph\u00e9tis\u00e9 par ce christianisme-\u00e9vang\u00e9liste) va probablement se d\u00e9rouler dans cette g\u00e9n\u00e9ration et qu’un conflit contemporain en Isra\u00ebl et une guerre imminente avec l’Iran pourraient en fait d\u00e9clencher des \u00e9v\u00e9nements annon\u00e7ant pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment une telle apocalypse.<\/em><\/p>\n » Donald Trump est, selon toute vraisemblance, bien trop int\u00e9ress\u00e9, \u00e9gocentrique et cynique pour adh\u00e9rer \u00e0 la foi aveugle et eschatologique des deux Mike. Il est clair qu’il ne croit qu’en Donald Trump. Et pourtant, quelle terrible ironie si, en raison de sa parfaite disposition \u00e0 d\u00e9chaîner les temp\u00eates où il aurait le r\u00f4le avantageux, il finissait involontairement par jouer le r\u00f4le de cet Ant\u00e9christ lui-m\u00eame dont les \u00e9vang\u00e9listes croient la venue et l’action n\u00e9cessaires pour provoquer la Fin des Temps.<\/em><\/p>\n » Étant donn\u00e9 les fondations de l’Arm\u00e9e du Chaos mise en place pour Trump par George W. Bush et Barack Obama, et la capacit\u00e9 de Trump \u00e0 ignorer toute prudence, il est difficile d’imaginer un meilleur candidat pour jouer ce r\u00f4le<\/em>. » <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Certes, l’hypoth\u00e8se de la venue de l’Ant\u00e9christ n’est pas nouvelle, et elle a d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e9voqu\u00e9e largement pour notre p\u00e9riode, dans le cadre d’un \u00ab\u00a0complotisme m\u00e9taphysique\u00a0\u00bb qui a sa logique propre et ses z\u00e9lotes. Comme l’indique Sjursen, il y en a une flop\u00e9e dans l’administration Trump, et jusqu’\u00e0 un Vice-Pr\u00e9sident qui poursuivrait bien \u00e0 contre-emploi ce r\u00f4le d'\u00a0\u00bbAnt\u00e9christ\u00a0\u00bb pour acc\u00e9l\u00e9rer la venue de la Fin des Temps. (Belle perspective pour le cas d’une destitution r\u00e9ussie.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Sjursen a \u00e9t\u00e9 officier dans l’U.S. Army et il a servi dans les diverses campagnes en cours, notamment en Irak et en Afghanistan, alternant avec des postes bureaucratiques et \u00e9galement une p\u00e9riode d’enseignement de l’histoire \u00e0 West Point. Il a pu voir lors de ses d\u00e9ploiements en zone de combat les incroyables destructions, massacres, tueries qui ont marqu\u00e9 ces conflits. Il y a cinq ans, selon ses propres mots, Sjursen est devenu \u00ab\u00a0un dissident\u00a0\u00bb alors qu’il \u00e9tait encore major dans l’U.S. Army, avant de quitter l’arm\u00e9e pour devenir auteur et compl\u00e8tement dissident.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Son article est \u00e0 la fois un rappel de l’activit\u00e9 militariste des USA depuis 9\/11, et une r\u00e9flexion sur le fonctionnement de cette activit\u00e9, sur ses aspects de plus en plus totalement incontr\u00f4lables et de plus en plus priv\u00e9s de sens (indiff\u00e9rents \u00e0 quelque sens que ce soit), sur sa propension extraordinaire \u00e0 semer le chaos et la destruction sans jamais remporter une victoire ou terminer une guerre, sans aucune strat\u00e9gie ni but identifiable sinon cette volont\u00e9 aveugle de d\u00e9truire et encore de d\u00e9truire.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Sjursen pr\u00e9cise les conditions dans lesquelles se font les op\u00e9rations, la fa\u00e7on dont les op\u00e9rations se d\u00e9cident, la fa\u00e7on dont les officiers d’\u00e9tat-major peuvent orienter les d\u00e9cisions des chefs, et il constate que cette machinerie en apparence \u00e9quilibr\u00e9e finit par produire de plus en plus de situations monstrueuses. La \u00ab\u00a0Machine de Guerre\u00a0\u00bb se transforme ainsi en \u00ab\u00a0Machine du Chaos\u00a0\u00bb, sans le moindre sens, sans autre objectif que \u00ab\u00a0le chaos pour le chaos\u00a0\u00bb. Nous sommes d\u00e9sormais bien loin des conceptions en vogue dans les ann\u00e9es 2000 du \u00ab\u00a0chaos cr\u00e9ateur\u00a0\u00bb adapt\u00e9 pour la machinerie militaire \u00e0 partir des conceptions capitalistes, et th\u00e9oris\u00e9es par les m\u00eame robots-neocons <\/em>d\u00e9j\u00e0 en service sous G.W. Bush et qu’on retrouve aujourd’hui avec Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n A lire le rappel de ces d\u00e9veloppements où le r\u00f4le d’Obama n’a rien \u00e0 envier \u00e0 celui de GW dans la transformation radicale de la \u00ab\u00a0Machine de Guerre\u00a0\u00bb en \u00ab\u00a0Machine du Chaos\u00a0\u00bb, on comprend la vanit\u00e9 de ces diverses th\u00e9ories soi-disant sophistiqu\u00e9es, plus ou moins \u00ab\u00a0complotistes\u00a0\u00bb, etc. Le d\u00e9veloppement de ce ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne unique rel\u00e8ve d’une tendance \u00e0 la destruction qui n’a plus rien de conceptuel ni de rationnel, – m\u00eame de conceptuel et de rationnel dans les orientations les plus critiquables, comme l’imp\u00e9rialisme, les plans de conqu\u00eate, etc. On a vraiment la sensation d’une machinerie de destruction qui a \u00e9chapp\u00e9 \u00e0 tout contr\u00f4le et qui \u00e9volue selon sa propre logique folle de destruction.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Ainsi, estime Sjursen \u00e0 propos de cette machine de destruction magnifiquement mise en place et \u00e9quip\u00e9e par Bush et Obama, tout se passe comme si elle semblait avoir trouv\u00e9 son \u00ab\u00a0fou\u00a0\u00bb pour la conduire dans ses options les plus extr\u00eames, – comme avec l’assassinat de Soleimani. A propos de Trump, Sjursen rappelle la \u00ab\u00a0Th\u00e9orie du Fou<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb de Nixon :<\/p>\n<\/p>\n « J’appelle cela la th\u00e9orie du fou, Bob<\/em>[Nixon parlant \u00e0 son chef de cabinet Haldeman]. Je veux que les Nord-Vietnamiens croient que j’ai atteint le point où je pourrais faire n’importe quoi pour mettre fin \u00e0 la guerre. Nous leur ferons passer le mot : \u00ab\u00a0Pour l’amour de Dieu, vous savez que Nixon est obs\u00e9d\u00e9 par le communisme. Nous ne pouvons pas le contr\u00f4ler lorsqu’il est en col\u00e8re, et cet homme a la main sur le d\u00e9tonateur.\u00a0\u00bb Et H\u00f4 Chi Minh en personne sera \u00e0 Paris dans les deux jours, implorant la paix<\/em>. »<\/p>\n<\/p>\n La th\u00e9orie de Nixon ne fonctionna pas, et il n’est m\u00eame pas assur\u00e9 que Kissinger (qui \u00e9tait charg\u00e9e d’en faire bon usage) l’utilisa jamais aupr\u00e8s des n\u00e9gociateurs nord-vietnamiens. Mais cette th\u00e9orie n’\u00e9tait bien entendu qu’un bluff, Nixon n’ayant jamais eu vraiment l’intention d’utiliser du nucl\u00e9aire. La situation est diff\u00e9rente avec Trump, on veut dire plus incertaine, \u00e0 cause du caract\u00e8re incontr\u00f4lable de Trump, et l’impression qu’il donne de ne pas \u00e9valuer pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment les dangers de l’usage des moyens militaires.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n C’est selon ces constats que Sjursen nous conduit \u00e0 nous demander si la \u00ab\u00a0Machine du Chaos\u00a0\u00bb n’a pas trouv\u00e9 son homme, – son \u00ab\u00a0fou\u00a0\u00bb si l’on veut, ou celui qui est capable de jouer jusqu’au bout le r\u00f4le du \u00ab\u00a0fou\u00a0\u00bb, – dans la personne de Donald Trump. D’où la conclusion qu’on a vue plus haut, avec l’hypoth\u00e8se que les chr\u00e9tiens-\u00e9vang\u00e9listes plac\u00e9s aux postes de direction pourraient juger que le pr\u00e9sident de la t\u00e9l\u00e9-r\u00e9alit\u00e9 ferait un excellent Ant\u00e9christ, – m\u00eame s’il s’agit d’un Ant\u00e9christ-bouffe, l’essentiel est qu’il accomplisse sa mission et nous fasse d\u00e9boucher sur la Fin des Temps.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Au d\u00e9but des ann\u00e9es 2000, ce genre de supputations s’apparentait au grotesque ou au lunatisme cauchemardesque. Aujourd’hui, où nous nous trouvons devant la cavalcade folle et b\u00e9ante de la \u00ab\u00a0Machine du Chaos\u00a0\u00bb sans explication, sans but, sans raison sinon de d\u00e9truire pour d\u00e9truire, apr\u00e8s presque vingt ann\u00e9es du m\u00eame exercice, tout se passe comme si, – toujours cette formule maudite et passe-partout de la d\u00e9monstration, scientifique ! – ceux qui croient \u00e0 de telles perspectives eschatologiques finissaient par laisser \u00e0 croire que des explications de cette sorte ne sont pas n\u00e9cessairement sans le moindre sens, sans le moindre cr\u00e9dit. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sjursen met bien en \u00e9vidence pour nous combien nous sommes \u00e0 bout de souffle sur le territoire de la raison pour donner une appr\u00e9ciation valable, m\u00eame horriblement pessimiste et destructrice, \u00e0 cet enchaînement d’\u00e9v\u00e9nements qui semblent sortir d’une sorte de Mordor<\/em>n\u00e9cessairement diabolique. Nous sommes au-del\u00e0 de la critique politique extr\u00e9miste, au-del\u00e0 du complotisme, au-del\u00e0 de l’activisme secret, du coup d’État dissimul\u00e9… La lecture de l’article de Sjursen nous renforce dans l’id\u00e9e que nous vivons des temps qui sortent compl\u00e8tement des s\u00e9ries historiques, m\u00eame les plus h\u00e9ro\u00efques et les plus terribles, qu’il s’agit d’interroger la m\u00e9tahistoire directement \u00e0 partir des \u00e9v\u00e9nements que nous vivons jour apr\u00e8s jour, pour parvenir \u00e0 leur donner leurs vraies dimensions, que ces vraies dimensions sont effrayantes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Si nous-m\u00eames sommes conduits \u00e0 mentionner cette sorte d’arguments, on imagine ce que peuvent croire, esp\u00e9rer et entreprendre des personnages comme Pompeo et Pence, en position d’influencer un Trump qui est compl\u00e8tement prisonnier des vanit\u00e9s diverses de son narcissisme, qui pour cela ne calcule pas les cons\u00e9quences de ses actes sinon pour ce qu’elles lui apportent de confirmation de tout le bien qu’il pense de lui-m\u00eame. L’aveu de Pompeo<\/a> (son « We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal<\/em> » [« Nous mentons, nous trichons, nous volons<\/em> »]) n’est finalement pas la confession un peu cynique et impudente d’un bandit, d’un gangster dans sa fonction de tueur, enfin d’un homme sans foi ni loi ; justement le contraire, c’est la d\u00e9claration pleine de v\u00e9rit\u00e9 selon ce qu’il croit, d’un homme de foi qui est pr\u00eat \u00e0 toutes les vilenies pour faire se r\u00e9aliser la proph\u00e9tie \u00e0 laquelle il croit et la loi de laquelle il se soumet. On se doute que, dans ces conditions, la fr\u00e9quentation d’Isra\u00ebl comme l’a institu\u00e9e l’administration Trump couronne le tout.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n L’article de Danny Sjursen sur le site TomDispatch.com <\/em>de Tom Engelhardt est \u00e9dit\u00e9 le 23 janvier 2020<\/a>sur ce site.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n _________________________<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre<\/a> of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested<\/a> that Old Glory should be redesigned \u00ab\u00a0with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9\/11 has backfired<\/a> in wildly counterproductive ays, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment — only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol<\/a> for chaos.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/a>After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision<\/a> to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations<\/a> in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner, – I’m loathe to call it a \u00ab\u00a0process\u00a0\u00bb, – by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call<\/a> himself \u00ab\u00a0the decider,\u00a0\u00bb an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a \u00ab\u00a0decision briefing\u00a0\u00bb convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you \u00ab\u00a0under the hood\u00a0\u00bb for some inside baseball. I, – and just about every new staff officer, – was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose). <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks<\/a> method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a \u00ab\u00a0just-right\u00a0\u00bb course of action. It nearly always worked. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance, – far more than most commanders, – to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was a sociopath<\/a> who gave vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option around. Sound familiar? It should! <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Still, military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse–<\/strong>ordering the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n And as recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops) or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two million<\/a> uniformed service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a captain (me, then) or, – as in the recent decision to assassinate<\/a> Iranian Major General Suleimani, – Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Soon after President Trump’s egregious<\/a>, a-strategic, dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign country, reports<\/a> surfaced describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme<\/a> measure they presented him with, – assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly, that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to<\/a> a report in the New York Times<\/em>, his generals were indeed surprised strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light<\/a> to such a future assassination, – the deepest desire, by the way, of both his secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton). <\/p>\n<\/p>\n At this point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof<\/a> that, 18-plus years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both competence and integrity.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The current commander-in-chief could never have expanded<\/a> America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises<\/a>) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Guided by a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to the \u00ab\u00a0original sin<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb of expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9\/11 attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses. He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the Islamic Republic in an imaginary \u00ab\u00a0axis of evil<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb (with Iraq and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which froze<\/a> the assets of Iranians allegedly connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture, indefinite detention, extraordinar rendition<\/a>, illegal domestic mass surveillance<\/a>, and drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries — then lied about it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for foreign policy.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Barack Obama promised \u00ab\u00a0hope and change,\u00a0\u00bb a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as surprised as many of us were<\/a> when, despite slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own perilous precedents along the way.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It was, after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations, took Bush’s drone program and ran with it<\/a>. He would be the first president to truly earn the sobriquet \u00ab\u00a0assassin-in-chief<\/a>." He made selecting individuals for assassination in \u00ab\u00a0Terror Tuesday<\/a>" meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed, – even killing American citizens<\/a> without due process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a \u00ab\u00a0shit show<\/a>." After vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in the Syrian civil war, empowering<\/a> Islamist factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n In response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State, – an al-Qaeda offshoot first catalyzed<\/a> by the Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formed<\/a>in an American prison in that country, – its taking<\/a> of key Iraqi cities and smashing<\/a> of the American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded<\/a> his predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent. There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare has exploded<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Finally, it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst<\/a> humanitarian disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling<\/a> body counts, and increased rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n During the climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed what he dubbed the \u00ab\u00a0madman theory<\/a>" for bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion. The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling<\/a> him:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u00ab\u00a0I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button<\/a>‘ and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh<\/a> himself will be in Paris<\/a> in two days begging for peace.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n It didn’t work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly<\/a> (and illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam. Apart from slaughtering<\/a> hundreds of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later. Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater Middle East.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n So it was, with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on testing out his own<\/a> personal \u00ab\u00a0fire and fury<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb version of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening<\/a> North Korea, seizing<\/a> Syrian oil fields, sending<\/a> yet more military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves also seem bound to fail.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Take the Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far) been avoided, thanks not to the \u00ab\u00a0deal-making\u00a0\u00bb skills of that self-styled \u00ab\u00a0stable genius<\/a>" in the White House but to Iran’s long history<\/a> of restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it<\/a>: \u00ab\u00a0The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.\u00a0\u00bb <\/p>\n<\/p>\n In fact, Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even managed briefly to unite<\/a> a divided Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand<\/a> a full U.S. troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment<\/a> to restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with Washington.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n If George W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n All of which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key figures on the Trump team – notably<\/a> Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence — explicitly view the Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73%<\/a> of evangelicals (or 20%<\/a> of the U.S. population), Pompeo and Pence believe<\/a> that the Rapture<\/a> (that is, the prophesied Christian end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending<\/a> war with Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an apocalypse. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Donald Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if, due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role of the very Antichrist<\/a> those evangelicals<\/a> believe necessary to usher in end-times.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Given the foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate to play that role. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n L’Ant\u00e9christ et l’Arm\u00e9e du Chaos Trump est-il l’Ant\u00e9christ avec lequel nous avons rendez-vous ? C’est une hypoth\u00e8se int\u00e9ressante, \u00e9crite avec une ironie fatigu\u00e9e et un brin de \u00ab\u00a0apr\u00e8s tout pourquoi pas ?\u00a0\u00bb, qui couronne le texte de Danny Sjursen sur le site TomDispatch.com de Tom Engelhardt. Dans tous les cas, Trump poss\u00e8de l’instrument pour h\u00e2ter… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[11662,16602,19653,2913,12795,12941,19654,6750,13443],"class_list":["post-79076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ouverture-libre","tag-danny","tag-derniers","tag-evangelisres","tag-les","tag-pence","tag-pompeo","tag-sjursen","tag-temps","tag-tomdispatch"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
dedefensa.org<\/em><\/h4>\n<\/p>\n
The American Chaos Machine<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
The Goldilocks Method<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
The Chaos Machine’s Tragic Foundations<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
The Trumpian Perfect Storm<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
The Rapture as Foreign Policy<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
Danny Sjursen<\/h4><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"