Why Stop At Venezuela? An Empire From East To West - Donald Trump Channels Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse. 

 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

'Genghis Khan is my hero', Donald Trump confided to his advisors shortly after America's successful putsch in Venezuela, removing the dictator from power and installing an American regime in his place.  Of course the President denied that America would rule, run, or own the country, but it sure felt like that. 

Venezuelans were delighted to be rid of dictator Maduro, and showered kisses and flowers on American conquering soldiers, but few had any idea of what to expect from American military rule.  Whatever, it could never as bad as the last 27 years. 

Governance was the last thing on the President's mind, for he was already planning his next conquest - Greenland, Iran, or perhaps or Colombia.  There was plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked by the world's greatest power with a strong, determined leader at the helm. 

Few Americans had ever heard of Genghis Khan let alone known about his exploits, and even less about his barbarism; but Donald Trump was not one of them.  He had read everything about the man, his Mongol-Turkic armies, and his military conquests from the Far East to Europe. 

'Imagine Genghis Khan with an army of ten thousand men thundering out of the Steppes, slaying all in his wake, laying waste to village after village, and nothing but carnage and death in his wake from the Far East to Europe.', reminisced the President. 'It must have been a grand and heroic spectacle.

'No Kings?', the President went on. 'Hah, chicken feed.'

Trump had made no bones about his admiration for his adversaries, Putin and Xi of China - men of absolute power and authority, Nietzschean will and unbounded ambition who took what they wanted and never looked back. 

‘Sleepy Joe Biden' fiddled while Moscow and Beijing were flexing their muscles, a weak sister, a namby-pamby soggy internationalist who would not recognize threat if it stared him in the face.

‘Not me', said the President. 'The world will shake as my 50,000 soldiers come thundering out of the steppes'. 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking while Genghis Khan added an almost untamed savagery to his victories.

William Tecumseh Sherman understood history well and rode through South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union and fire the first shots against the North, intent on destroying every building, every crop, every monument, and every byway of the state to teach it an unforgettable lesson – the South will never rise again.

A century later Israeli Defense Forces followed the lessons of Sherman and Genghis Khan.  Attacks on the State of Israel would be met not only with reprisal, but with the full might of its military power.  It’s retaliation would  be complete, disproportionate, and annihilating.  The integrity and survival of the State of Israel would never, ever be compromised, and any action to assure its safety would be justified.

'Heroes', said Trump, 'great men'.  Wars are for winning, a lesson lost on America in post-WWII America. 

Now there is a very different calculus of war. The defeat of the enemy – Iraqi, Afghani, or Vietnamese was conditional on limited American casualties.  Battlefield generals have always calculated personnel losses when defining military strategy.  If too many men were lost, then the battle would be lost.  

Marcus Aurelius fighting his last wars against the restive German tribes did indeed calculate risks to the cavalry and to his infantry, but was not making moral decisions, only practical ones.  American generals now consider the moral implications of G.I. deaths.

The wars of the early and mid-20th century and those before were also only marginally concerned with civilian populations, unlike today when ‘collateral damage’ is always to be avoided and risk to non-combatants carefully calculated.  American persistent but recent moral rectitude and sense of democratizing mission demands such calculations.

It was most definitely not so during World War II when we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – all deliberate attempts to incinerate civilian populations.  The only relevant objective was the defeat of the Nazis and the Japanese.  Any other consideration was irrelevant.

In the Vietnam War, perhaps because American leaders were never really convinced of the rightness of their cause, a special emphasis was placed on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of Vietnamese civilians.  This effort was designed to both show American beneficence and generosity and to gain local allies.  As history has shown, this idealistic notion never worked, nor ever had a chance of working.  

The Vietnamese showed themselves to be a brutal, implacable enemy which had only one thought in mind – defeating the Americans by killing them.  Ho Chi Minh of course understood the psychology of war and knew how to rattle American forces through the uncertainty and unpredictability of attacks, by quickly removing their dead, and by the placement of landmines; and he understood American history and current political opinion and knew that we would get tired of war.  Yet he was determined and unstoppable in his fight to kill and remove.

'Nevermore', said Donald Trump. 'The Vietnamese were Genghis Khan incarnate.  We will again be like that', and so it was that the American President took the nation into a new era of realpolitik, Machiavellian ethos, and Genghis Khan absolutism. 

Now, Trump will unlikely act on his stated intentions - Greenland is part of Denmark, a sovereign European country, ally of the United States, and Colombia is a Taco Bell, enchilada state posing no great threat to America, a country already awash in cocaine so a little more is not worth the effort of a coup.  The destruction of Venezuelan drug boats had nothing to do with drugs.  It was all about a show of American military resolve and a 'watch out' shot across Maduro's bow. 

American hegemony is a complicated affair.  The country's adversaries are all over the globe, but that should not diminish Trump's ambition for world domination.  China certainly wants it and is on its way to having it; and if America dallies too long, it will be too late.  

‘Takeover' by China means buying up all rare earth materials, concluding favorable 'friendship' contracts throughout Africa where natural resources are vast, exerting financial control over developed economies like the United States where China owns much of that nation's debt, and threatening dissidence everywhere with shows of military might. 

Trump may have Genghis Khan ambitious, but he knows that military conquest is only one of his options for extending his and America's influence.  'That Chinaman is smart', said Trump to his foreign policy advisor. 

Yet it is the spirit of Genghis Khan which animates Donald Trump, the unalloyed will to power and empire and the unintimidated use of it. 

 

'I love the guy', said the President.