What is the United States doing in (or, really, to) Iran? Critic Patrick Blanchfield situates the bombardment of the country within the long legacy of an American empire that doesn’t care about norms, much less rules, and insists the game will go its way despite ample evidence to the contrary:
Trump is the perfect vehicle, spokesman, and avatar for our late-imperial heedlessness, and at the same time, he clearly represents a continuation and intensification of tendencies that have long been converging in American politics, pushing those tendencies to their logical extreme with all the ruthless dependability of the profit motive itself. What differentiates Trump from his predecessors is his refusal to do what Lacan would call feigning to feign, his total inability to conjure the pretense of at least pretending to publicly care about pretense. Especially in his second term Trump has pushed on without restraint, internal or otherwise, at once lazy and inexorable, leaving everybody else to bemoan norms that no longer apply. The machinery of war is in motion, because it’s been in motion for a long, long time. What else is that machinery supposed to do?
More picks about foreign policy
Shooting an Elephant in Botswana
“Trophy hunting is uncomfortable for some in the West but a lifeline for many locals.”
Fentanyl: The Portrait of a Mass Murderer
“A cheap, white powder—50 times more powerful than heroin—which kills more than 70,000 people each year in the United States and countless others across the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”
Were They Lost Students or Inept Spies for China?
Two students from China, studying at the University of Michigan, travel to Florida during their winter break and find themselves in trouble after entering the Naval Air Station Key West, a major U.S. military facility.
