Canada. With anger, alarm, and astonishment, I recently watched President Donnie Drumpf, ensconced among his courtiers and praise singers in his usual grandiose display, announce the renaming of the Ministry of Defence to the Ministry of War.
As a peace scholar, mark these words: the Ministry of what? War, of course. Drumpf claimed the change would “preserve the toughness” of the US army, but said little about its actual mandate, security, or integrity. My first question: was the army created to produce toughness or to defend the country?
I had assumed the army’s strength was meant to protect the nation from foreign threats, drug proliferation, and gun violence. I also assumed that President Drumpf understood the army’s mandate, of which he is Commander-in-Chief. Another question: how will citizens benefit from this supposed “toughness”? Was it part of any campaign promise? Who is deceiving whom, and why?
Before this, I saw clips of his courtiers telling Drumpf he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. A Nobel what? Drumpf appears to live on the moon, in a deluded world of unipolarity he pretends is multipolarity.
There are more questions than answers. Yet Drumpf, ever the political egotist, seems content to deceive himself. If there were a fitting prize for him, it would be one for war, not peace. Sans doute, he deserves recognition for belligerence, not harmony. I doubt he has ever experienced peace in the White House.
Does he understand the meaning and necessity of peace? Has he known peace amid divorces, moral decay, chauvinism, and hedonism? Watching Drumpf, I see a figure akin to Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, or even Idi Amin of Uganda, a corrupt and self-indulgent potentate.
His rationale is equally troubling. Drumpf claims he can make peace through violence. For him, peace cannot exist without chaos. He has repeatedly bombed Iran, targeted Venezuelan “drug boats,” and threatened Greenland.
He surrounds himself with leaders labelled dictators by the West: Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un. He once praised Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin before backtracking. These are hardly the acts of a peacemaker, yet he imagines a Nobel Peace Prize awaits him.
If Drumpf were considered for such an award, it would be a profound injustice. By that logic, figures like Idi Amin, Samuel Doe, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and Joseph-Désiré Mobutu might also have qualified. Expect the unexpected. And, if it pleases him, he may soon rename the Ministry of Trade the Ministry of Tariffs.
