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Opinion
As observers around the world try to make sense of Donald Trump’s frenetic, non-stop threats and military assaults against foreign lands, some are turning to a satirical movie from nearly 30 years ago.
Around September, analysts started exhuming the 1997 title Wag the Dog. It’s shorthand for how a president can create a performative foreign war to distract attention from a sex scandal or other inconvenience.
The original satire won lots of attention. It was funny, it boasted an ensemble cast and it quickly proved prescient.
In the movie, a storied spin doctor, played by Robert De Niro, decides that America urgently needs a war to take the spotlight off the news that the president had made sexual advances to an underage girl in the Oval Office.
“We can’t afford a war,” counters a White House aide, played by Anne Heche. “We’re going to have the appearance of a war,” says the master manipulator. And so the American public found that the US was, inexplicably, at war with Albania. Only the conjurors of the images knew that the footage was of fake missiles exploding on film-set Albania.
Within a month of its release, news broke of president Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. And about eight months later, as the scandal peaked and Clinton apologised, his administration launched missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan.
And now the tail of political news management has been spotted wagging the dog of American foreign policy once more. “On September 2, the House Oversight Committee released documents related to Jeffrey Epstein,” wrote a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Michael Paarlberg, “and President Trump decided to blow up a boat.”
Specifically, it was the first of the Venezuelan drug boats that Trump detonated. Paarlberg’s piece for the Centre for International Policy was titled Trump’s Wag the Dog Moment. Since then, the motif has been picked up by a string of others, including Jimmy Kimmel and The Hill insider political news site.
It might have been a sheer coincidence, but for the fact that Trump craves and creates new confrontations as a continuous condition of his presidency. What was the urgency of hitting the Venezuelan drug boats, and then kidnapping the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro? None. The guy was a curse on his own country and had long been antagonistic towards America. Few will mourn the loss of the dictator. But he was no threat to the US.
The reasons Trump gave were confected. He claimed that Venezuela supplied fentanyl to the US, but the vast bulk of that deadly opioid is made from precursor chemicals exported from China and manufactured into fentanyl in Mexico, then sent to the US.
Neither does America’s cocaine come from Venezuela. It’s sourced from Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, and smuggled to the US through Mexico. Grabbing Venezuelan oil was an ex post facto justification. And, in any case, the US today is not the US of times past. America is now fully self-sufficient in oil. It supplies 106 per cent of its needs. It’s now a net exporter.
And Trump’s manoeuvre has removed Maduro but it hasn’t saved Venezuela from the grip of the Maduro regime. The same crew still controls the country.
The urgency of hitting Venezuela immediately was replaced with the urgency of seizing Denmark’s territory of Greenland.
Trump didn’t even pause to savour his Maduro moment before rushing headlong into his next faux fight. At the very press conference where he announced Maduro’s capture, Trump, unprompted, declared his intention to take Greenland. Again, why the rush?
And, again, his stated reasons for demanding Greenland “one way or another” are just silly. The US already has an air force base there and, under the 1951 US treaty with Denmark, it can add to its military bases there at any time.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has said she was open to more US military assets in Greenland any time, and allowing US access to Greenland’s buried rare earths deposits any time.
There’s no need to seize the island. The real US Arctic security priority, as many experts have explained, is the US state of Alaska. It’s vulnerable to Russian encroachment and it’s practically undefended. Trump could start building defence assets in Alaska immediately. Yet he shows no interest.
Trump’s predations on foreign lands have a few factors in common. First, he chooses countries that can’t fight back. Where is his pressure on America’s traditional enemies and real rivals? Where are the ultimatums to Russia, North Korea, China? He even gave Russia an exemption from his punitive tariffs.
He prefers to threaten Canada and thug Denmark. He threatens the unthreatening and antagonises the allies. He ingratiates himself with the nuclear-armed countries that would gladly destroy the US if they thought they could get away with it.
So far, none of the fights that Trump has picked are real wars. They’re theatrical strikes conducted at minimal cost. As the De Niro character says, “it’s not a war, it’s a pageant”.
Next, he has Iran in his sights. Iran is, at least, a long-standing US enemy. And although it’s much weakened at the moment, it still has some formidable capacity to harm its neighbours. What will Trump do now with the armada he’s assembled?
When the US and Israel struck Iran last year, in an entirely just cause, it was entirely a campaign of air strikes. If Trump conducts the same sort of campaign now, it won’t suffice to bring down the ayatollahs. No one would miss them, apart from the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah. We’ll see whether this is any more far-reaching an attack than the last one.
A bad omen for Iran is the new wave of Epstein files. The more Trump wants to distract from Epstein, the greater the risk for foreign targets of convenience. Trump has another, even more intractable, problem that he seeks to avoid – the rising cost of living in the US.
In Wag the Dog, the fake war was needed to distract the public for 11 days before an election. In the Trump sequel, he needs distractions to run for nearly 11 months before the midterms. And perhaps longer. It’s going to be an anxious time for countries everywhere. Except for America’s most formidable enemies.
Peter Hartcher is the international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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