Trump: “This problem with Vietnam … We stopped fighting to win. We would have won easy. We would have won Afghanistan easy. Would have won every war easy. But we got politically correct: ‘Ah, let’s take it easy!’. It’s that we’re not politically correct anymore. Just so you understand: We win. Now we win”. All these would have been easy -- along with Afghanistan.
What was the meaning to Trump’s reference to Vietnam? ‘What he was saying is that ‘we’ would have won Vietnam easily, if we hadn’t been woke and DEI’. Some veterans might amplify, ‘You know: we had enough firepower: We could have killed everyone’.
“No matter where you go”, Trump adds, “no matter what you even think about, there’s nothing like the fighting force that we have [including] Rome … No one should ever want to start a fight with the USA”.
The point is that in today’s Trump circles, not only is there no fear of war, but there is this unsubstantiated delusion of American military power. Hegseth said: “We are the most powerful military on the history of the planet, bar none. Nobody else can even come close to it”. To which Trump adds, “Our market [too], is the greatest in the world - no one can live without it”.
The Anglo-US ‘Empire’ is backing itself into the corner of ‘terminal decline’, as French philosopher, Emmanual Todd puts it. Trump is attempting, on the one hand, to coerce into being a new ‘Bretton Woods’ in order to re-create dollar hegemony through threat, bluster and tariffs -- or war, if needs be.
Todd believes that as the Anglo-US Empire falls apart, the US is lashing out at the world in fury -- and is devouring itself through the attempt to re-colonise its own colonies (i.e. Europe) for quick financial shakedowns.
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