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In 8th and 9th grade, I ran into a couple of wannabe bullies. I was young for my grade, having skipped a year early on, and being an introverted intellectual type didn’t help. In 8th grade it was George E., a stocky guy from a German-Polish background, messing with me during lunch hour. Then in 9th grade a tall, lanky, sneering blond 10th-grader named Peter lay in wait for me after school.
In both cases they harassed and insulted me until I agreed to fight them. And in both cases, one punch was all it took—a shot to the jaw in one case, and to the eye in the other—to transform them from sadistic aggressors into whimpering blobs of jelly, one nursing a sore jaw and the other an incipient black eye.
Bullies are like that. They love to pick on people who (they hope) can’t or won’t fight back. But if you do fight back, it can be surprising how quickly their bluster turns to self-pity.
Israel, of course, is the premiere example of the cowardly bully as nation-state. The Israelis love to slaughter unarmed women and children, preferably from a safe distance. But despite their huge advantage in armaments, they are reluctant to wade into the tunnels of Gaza, where courageous Islamic resistance fighters await them.
That’s why “Israel” is doomed. When the Zionists finally recognize that those who remain in Occupied Palestine are inevitably going to suffer a significant fraction of the pain they’ve imposed on others, they’ll flee like the cowardly rabid rats they so obviously are.
Trump as Bully
Trump, like his boss Netanyahu, likes to pick on weaker opponents. Russia can fight back, so Trump is backing off. Same with China: Since chances of a US victory in the South China Sea have sunk even faster than American aircraft carriers would in an actual war, Trump isn’t likely to poke the dragon hard enough to start anything serious. Meanwhile, Trump’s erratic trade policy is strengthening the Global South and setting the stage for a US surrender in which the Multipolar Many will relegate the Western Financier Few to the proverbial dustbin of history.
Since he’s afraid to fight anyone his own size (and thankfully so) but remains a cowardly bully at heart, Trump is flailing wildly in search of smaller countries to pick on. The Western hemisphere seems likely to bear the brunt of his wrath. Trump is threatening to invade Canada, threatening to steal Greenland from Denmark, threatening to invade Mexico and Venezuela under the pretext of going after drug traffickers, and threatening to invade Panama and steal the Canal even without a pretext. And he’s lashing out against Brazil with 50% tariffs in hopes of forcing regime change.
Trump also seems to enjoy bullying his ostensible NATO allies. When he summoned European heads of state to Washington last week to impose surrender terms for their idiotic US-instigated war on Russia, the US president played the schoolteacher ordering naughty children to his office so he could smack their behinds.
All of this bullying of weaker countries is not going to save the Empire. On the contrary, it seems likely to hasten its demise. Most obviously, bullying invites resentment, sullen non-compliance, and deniable or under-the-radar scheming against the perpetrator. The aura of legitimacy that the US Empire has enjoyed throughout its post-WW2 heyday is being undermined by Trump’s ill-mannered threats and humiliations of practically everyone within earshot.
And then there is the possibility that the bully will bite off more than he can chew, by starting an actual fight with a seemingly weaker opponent who fights back. That’s what happened when Trump attacked Iran to save Netanyahu’s Israel from complete destruction at the receiving end of an increasingly-effective onslaught of Iranian missiles. Trump-n-Yahoo hoped to inflict a decisive defeat on Iran that would end its nuclear program and trigger regime change, ideally by placing the Shah’s idiot grandson on a restored Peacock Throne. That backfired spectacularly when Iran hid its enriched uranium and quickly became a de facto undeclared nuclear weapons state, while the Iranian people rallied overwhelmingly in support of their Islamic Republican government and the new generation of ultra-hardliners taking charge of it. And while Trump did succeed in intimidating Armenia’s Khachaturyan into surrendering to Azerbaijan and facilitating its plans to let the US occupy a strategic corridor on Iran’s northern border, Tehran’s new generation of hardliners with their de facto nuclear weapons state are unlikely to allow that project to come to fruition.
As I write this in late August, the hot spot where Trump’s bullying is most likely to trigger a shooting war is Venezuela. By some estimates Caracas controls the world’s single biggest batch of oil reserves, which is why the US assassinated President Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, while pushing a long series of unsuccessful coup attempts. If Trump sends troops into Venezuela seeking to collect the US bounty on Maduro’s head, they will face 4.5 million armed militia members as well as Venezuela’s regular armed forces, backed to an as-yet-undetermined extent by China, now the world’s most powerful nation. The result will very likely be another humiliating US regime-change failure, and a slap in the face of bully Trump.
The US empire is in steep decline. Its manners and morals are declining even faster. And the manners and morals of its Commander-in-Chief are already so pathetically abysmal that further decline seems almost impossible. Meanwhile, the question remains: Will Trump succeed by bullying most of the world—including his own supporters, whom he seeks to intimidate into forgetting they ever heard of Jeffrey Epstein? Or will the global bully get his comeuppance, to the wild cheers of his billions of erstwhile victims?
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