President Donald Trump apparently can’t wait to show the United States as a no-nonsense military power always in ready-to-strike mode. This is an obvious retreat from the tag-teaming and hesitant approach of his predecessor, President Barak Obama, which he considers to have robbed America of some of its historical military dread. But Mr. Trump is dangerously hazy about his policy objectives and alliances in global affairs, and could just be on an indiscriminate mission to ‘make America great again’ militarily.
On Thursday, last week, American forces dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on a network of tunnels in eastern Afghanistan suspected to harbour Islamic State (ISIS) fighters. U.S. war planes staged a unilateral mission to drop the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb, nicknamed “mother of all bombs” and carrying 11 tonnes of explosives, in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, leaving some 36 ISIS militants dead.
The civilised world can really do with far many more casualties of those brutal terrorists if they would not repent. But the challenge of ISIS terrorism is a long-standing global scourge that until now involved the international community in concerted action against the group, and the reason for America’s decision to go solo last week remains unspecified by Washington. Mr. Trump cited the strike as redirecting America from its recent history, though. “Another successful job. We’re very, very proud of our military,” he told reporters at the White House. He did not answer directly when a journalist asked if he specifically authorized the use of the massive bomb. “Everybody knows exactly what happened. We have the greatest military in the world…We have given them total authorization…If you look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare that with what’s happened over the last eight years, you’ll see there’s a tremendous difference. Tremendous difference,” he said.
President Trump was obviously alluding to other military exploits lately staged by his administration. Two Fridays ago, the United States fired dozens of cruise missiles at Syria’s Shayrat air base, near Homs, from which it suspected the regime of Bashar al-Assad launched a deadly chemical weapons attack that killed more than 70 people earlier in the week. On the heels of that action, Trump had said the U.S. strike with some 60 Tomahawk missiles “represented the world.”
It was America’s first direct intervention in the six-year Syrian war. But Washington insisted the country wasn’t about to dump the policy of indirect involvement, and that the attack was intended to “send a message” to the Assad regime. The Shayrat attack invariably escalated U.S. role in Syria, however, and drew the country into a collision course with Russia. A joint command centre comprising the forces of Russia, Iran and militias supporting al-Assad said the U.S. action crossed red lines. “What America waged in its aggression on Syria is a crossing of red lines. From now on, we will respond with force to any aggressor or any breach of red lines from whoever it is, and America knows our ability to respond well,” the group said in a statement following the U.S. attack.
The irony of a possible U.S.-Russia military confrontation over Syria is that Russia is strongly suspected to have meddled in the 2016 American presidential election to help Mr. Trump into office against Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton. Indications of Russia’s meddlesomeness are currently being probed by the U.S. Congress, with hints of dire consequences for Trump if proven true. Against the historical bi-polar balance of world power, the nature of the Trump administration’s relationship with Putin’s Russia is widely viewed as an uncharted terrain that the world must watch out for how it unfolds. Earlier, both leaders made clear that they looked forward to much warmer ties than was the case under the former Obama administration. Syria, as it now seems, could just feed those prospects to the fire.
And the Trump administration’s interest isn’t limited to the Middle East, it is also exerting its might on the Korean Peninsula. Washington has deployed war vessels to dissuade the rouge North Korean regime from its threatened nuclear test, and American forces were as at the weekend poised to launch a preemptive strike should the mercurial Kim Jong-un show real intention of following through with his plan. Pyongyang, for its part, rebuffed the U.S. threat and said it would not be cowed. The power show touched some nerves in China, which is the only country that has relations with North Korea. Barely a week after President Trump received Chinese President Xi Jinping on a state visit to the U.S., China warned on Friday that “conflict could break out at any moment” over North Korea.
The message by Trump’s Washington seems to be that America remains a military power, and one that could act without the traditional alliances and coalitions. It remains to be seen how far the country could go it alone.
Jega, three other Nigerians in world club
Former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega, and three other eminent Nigerians have just been named to the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The other three are iconic writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, eminent scholar Professor Akin Mabogunje and Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) President Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede. They are among 228 members newly elected to the 237th class of the academy.
The former INEC chair was elected to the Public Affairs and Policy section of the revered body, Mabogunje of the University of Ibadan to the History section, and Chimamanda Adichie as Honorary Member in Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories, Non-Fiction, Playwriting, Screenwriting and Translation. It is a new feather in the studded cap of Chimamanda, who was in March elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
An announcement by the academy cited the four Nigerians in the 2017 membership class that includes winners of the Pulitzer Prize and Wolf Prize, MacArthur Fellows, Fields Medalists, Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Medal of Arts recipients, as well as Academy Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award and Tony Award winners. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 7.
Professor Jega’s election to the academy, which was founded in 1780, reinforces the positive perception of the international community of Nigerian elections over which he presided from 2010 to 2015. I had the good fortune of working with him during those years, and do not doubt that this is just one more of the many honours yet coming his way.