Recognizing America’s De-Developing Nation Status
The past week’s events have answered a question lingering since Donald J. Trump was elected the nation’s 45th President. Many have asked if military-backed fascism could happen here in the United States. There was a palpable feeling, reinforced by images of unidentified federal police and increasing numbers of federal troops and national guardsmen in our capital, that the answer to protest in the capital’s streets is force. Unfortunately, that is too often the case in non-democratic countries or ones flirting with authoritarianism. This is something I saw repeatedly in my service and scholarship, which is focused on the study of online censorship and propaganda in international affairs.
Since the end of the Second World War, it has been the job of America’s diplomats and intelligence officers to monitor the adherence of foreign governments to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in Paris in 1948. While U.S. interests have not always aligned with the ideas contained within the Universal Declaration, we Americans have believed in being on the right side of history in regard to it. As an officer in the Foreign Service and Senior Advisor to the State Department, I took human rights seriously. But there were also more practical concerns.
Understanding the near and more distant futures of a given country is an important part of life in the Foreign Service. Some of that knowledge is personally important. As an FSO, if you want to see an attempted coup, you may want to go to, say, Chad. If you would sooner avoid such things, may I show you Uruguay? There’s a whole spectrum of how dysfunctional countries are. Nobody ever quantified this when I was at State, but it was known. Sudan? Bad. Portugal? Good.
Like most Americans, I’ve always considered the U.S. to be among the least dysfunctional of states in the international system. No, we’re not Denmark or Norway, but neither is France. Conversely, the U.S. has employed a lot of influence predicated on the idea that it is a bulwark of the world’s most developed nations. Not only that, but the U.S. would live up to its international commitments. During the Cold War, our NATO allies generally trusted that if the Soviets came over the fence in Germany, we’d stand and fight beside our allies. We had military power borne of the greatest economic prosperity the world had ever seen throughout the Cold War.
But somewhere along the way, military power was decoupled from economic might creating broad prosperity (globalization, off-shoring, wage pressures, etc.) while cultural and informational soft power came to the fore. We assumed we had a better message. The soap opera Dallas, which aired in the U.S. from 1978 to 1991, was sometimes also aired by Warsaw Pact regimes hoping to expose our Western decadence. But the people I know who grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain often wanted the material trappings the tv soap had to offer. They were none too scared or turned off by it.
But while our national power and prestige rose in the 80s and 90s, rot began to set in. Since the 1970s, a number of political forces, mostly emanating from the right, have unwound our society to some degree. (On this topic, George Packer’s The Unwinding is worth a read.) According to his argument, with which I agree, the social contract of our society has been tearing apart for most of our lives now. A lot of what’s wrong is economic in nature. Unchecked capitalism produces tremendous wealth, but we see in our country that wealth does not equal societal health. We’ve seen examples of this for a long while — opioid addiction, the college admissions scandal, police brutality, insider trading — that are all indicators of something wrong. Another of these, police brutality, made public thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, just blasted Covid-19 off the home pages of domestic and global news media.
What is of most concern at this point in our national unwinding crisis is that we may be reaching a point at which the president chooses to employ military force to defeat his opponents. I fear we are at the beginning of a civil conflict in which people may be imprisoned (or worse) by agents of the state for what they say or believe. When those subjugated by the state respond with force, this becomes insurgency. Such action is a mortal threat to the state’s monopoly on large-scale, organized violence, and is typically met with forceful counterinsurgency.
Our country has known many insurgencies from the wars against the aboriginal peoples of North America to the conflict with ISIS and the Taliban (not to mention wars of varying sizes in: the Philippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Chad, Angola, China, Yemen, Somalia, and some others I probably missed). But not in more than a century have we crossed the rubicon of an active counter-insurgency on U.S. soil against the portions of the general population based upon their political beliefs. This is quite a disturbing prospect. (William Chin’s essay on counterinsurgency tactics applied to Blacks in the U.S. is superb and well counters my argument.)
Returning to the present, this week the President was looking for answers as to how to “dominate the battlespace” in the words of his defense secretary. This was very dangerous rhetoric. Once our nation’s commander-in-chief aims the weapons of U.S. military force at the American people, we have no idea what may happen. When I saw Army MPs in DC on television they did not appear well-drilled or enthusiastic (their uniforms didn’t match, for instance). Also, I worried that private military contractors might be on the streets, carrying no identification or insignia on their uniforms while stating that they are employed by the Department of Justice (these later turned out to be federal prison guards). There may be cohesion issues in police or military units. A Tennessee national guard unit put down their riot gear to stand with protesters earlier this week.
What concerns me is if the president decides to give the order to shoot, say in DC, if there were a massive march on the White House, we have no idea how that would impact our national cohesiveness and the very condition of the Republic. Also, what happens to those who refuse the order? This kind of breakdown is exactly the thing we have watched happen in countries including Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina over the last several decades. So, as we build a wall to separate the U.S. from Latin America, our country is beginning to look a lot more like most other large, Latin American states. They are plutocratic, democratically flawed, anti-press, corrupt, and chronically underperforming, both socially and economically. And while we are a long, long way off from Venezuela, the president’s tweets are a sort of reinterpretation of Aló Presidente, Hugo Chavez’s early 2000s propaganda talk show. Trump’s photo op this week in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in DC was pure populist pastiche of that sort.
Bottom line: We always worried what Trump would do in a crisis, and the crises he has found on his watch make those of George W. Bush and Obama look almost trivial. The absence of leadership is costing lives, and there are fears of state repression on par with that experienced in China today or possibly the Soviet Union. How this plays out will largely depend on what the professionals of the U.S. military do when told by their commander-in-chief to crush what may be labeled a criminal and ideological movement — say Antifa or BLM. I hope with every fiber of my existence that is a test of our nation that we can avoid.
Chris Bronk, a former foreign service officer, is an assistant professor of computer and information systems at the University of Houston. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Also, thanks to the-ever brilliant John Villaseñor for his comments on this essay.