Trump's Axis of Evil

The President singled out five evil regimes in his speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations today. His threat to "totally destroy" North Korea if necessary will certainly get the most attention, but while he issued no similar threat to Iran, his indictment against the Islamic Republic was more sweeping. Dismissing its republican pretensions as the "false guise of democracy," Trump takes the Sunni line that the Shiite power is the greatest destabilizing force in the Middle East. This remains inconsistent with his once-more avowed "America First" policy, since Sunni rather than Shiite terrorists have been carrying out attacks on the United States since 2001, but he may believe that Shiite aggression is a root cause of Sunni militancy. In any event, he seems satisfied that the Sunni states are taking positive steps to suppress terrorism, while beleaguered Syria, an Iranian ally, remains one of the bad guys. Continuing westward, the President turned his hostile attentions to Cuba and Venezuela, again hinting at American intervention in the latter country. Of course, the Bolivarian regime has been on the neocon hit list for more than a generation now, presumably because Americans want Venezuela's oil resources in pro-American hands. Whether that really counts as an "America First" strategy by established Trumpian standards is hard to say. Of these countries, only Iran can plausibly be deemed an aggressor in its region, however it justifies itself on anti-imperialist, anti-zionist or anti-Sunni grounds. North Korea simply wants a deterrent to regime change, Syria remains in a state of civil war, and Cuba and Venezuela are in no position to export revolution. Calling all of them out today simply puts Trump in line with recent presidents in letting a personal distaste for certain forms of government or leadership styles influence his foreign policy, despite his repeated insistence that he doesn't wish to impose American culture or ideology on other countries. I don't think he's become an ideologue all of a sudden, but he does seem to have succumbed, almost inevitably, to the American tendency to personalize geopolitics by reducing conflicts of national interests to the pathologies of evil men. Of course, Americans seem to think of domestic politics the same way lately, so this shouldn't surprise us, though it should still disappoint us. Trump's speech probably will disappoint everyone here but the neocons. It will alarm liberals and anti-interventionist types with its menacing rhetoric toward North Korea and its "Rocket Man," while it may more deeply disappoint base supporters who might have hoped to hear their hero stick it to Islam on the ultimate global stage. No doubt Trump himself will think of it as the greatest speech ever delivered to the UN by an American President, but who's really keeping score?