Trump's Red Line & Ours

In response to the chemical attack in Syria, President Trump has said that it “crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line” and has changed his thinking about President Bashar al-Assad. As I am writing this, bombs are not yet falling on Damascus (UPDATE: it’s official, now they are), but it is being widely reported that he is currently discussing military options with his staff. If President Trump actually does take America into yet another war (how many will this make now?), then the true Right needs to begin reevaluating its stance toward him. We also have a red line, and Trump seems poised to cross it. This must be our Rubicon.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that Trump and his people are worrying about what those few of us on the Alt Right will think if he goes to war with Assad. However, on this point, the Alt Right is certainly of one mind with the vast majority of those sixty-three million Americans who voted for Trump: namely, that we have had enough of neocon wars. It is no coincidence that Michigan, where I lived for many years, is both a state that has been very badly hit in terms of casualties in our recent string of wars, and is also one of the usually reliable Democrat states that flipped in the last election. Campaign promises aside, given how narrowly Trump managed to secure victory, it’s difficult for me to imagine why he and his people are so willing to throw those who did vote for him under the bus so quickly. No one in America voted for Trump so that he could continue to engage our country in senseless wars. (Although it seems he has won the support of Bill Kristol, unsurprisingly.)

We agreed with those sixty-three million Americans because it is one of the principles of the true Right that no people should interfere with the lives of another except where such is necessary for self-defense. We believe that all peoples have a responsibility to look after their own interests – including and most especially our own, but we respect others who wish to do so for their own as well when they don’t conflict with ours, most especially in the case of leaders like Assad, whose policies are in some way aligned with our own (such as in his opposition to radical Islamism).

Moreover, even if we were to accept that the rebels in Syria have noble intentions (I don’t, just to be clear), we must recognize that it is not the place of the United States to spend its own blood and treasure in the pursuit of goals that are the sole responsibility of the people of that nation. The Syrians should be left alone to sort out their politics for themselves. (Indeed, if we had followed such a policy from the outset, it’s likely that this war would never have come about in the first place, given America’s role in fanning its flames – which would also mean that there likely never would have been any “migrant crisis,” either, but that’s a subject for another time.) We’ve been responsible for too many failed attempts at nation-building over the last twenty-five years to undertake yet another.

I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories, but anyone rational has to admit that this attack is extremely suspect. The use of chemical weapons would be the act of a regime driven to desperation in the face of total defeat. In fact, Assad has been winning against ISIS and the other rebel groups for some time now. Why he would suddenly choose to resort to “weapons of mass destruction” now is mystifying, all the more so when he must surely realize that their use would be likely to provoke an American military response. This is also to ignore the fact that the last time a chemical attack took place in Syria that brought the US to the brink of war, in Ghouta in 2013, no definite proof of the government’s responsibility was ever produced, and it appears likely that it was staged by the rebels to coincide with the arrival of United Nations Mission inspectors. This latest attack bears all the signs of having been carried out for similar reasons. In 2013, faced with intense pressure from Putin and the refusal of the British Parliament to back a NATO military response, President Obama refrained from retaliation.

Read the rest of John Morgan's article at Counter-Currents