He is deploying troops to occupy opposition-held cities, openly soliciting bribes from the world’s dictators and threatening to annex his democratic neighbors, all while sending people guilty of literally nothing to foreign prisons where they are expected to remain until the day they die. That’s it: that’s the case for treating President Donald Trump, the authoritarian head of an increasingly belligerent nation, like an international pariah.
“Normally, I would agree that diplomacy is better than isolating an adversary,” Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch, a group that aims to predict and punish targeted mass murder, told Salon.
A former State Department official, Stanton watched from afar the genocide in Rwanda and the world’s failure to do anything about it, later authoring a 10-stage guide to knowing how and when such killings are set in motion (one early sign: those in power likening members of an ostracized class to “animals, vermin, insects or disease”). He is careful with his words, using the term “genocide,” for example, only when it meets the narrow definition of international law; he is a sober scholar who, like others who have studied history, has been forced by events to sound increasingly alarmist.
Stanton insists that diplomacy with Trump is worse than a lost cause. The American president is no “ordinary adversary” who can be wined, dined and reasoned with, he said, but someone who “stands far outside the bounds of diplomacy and the rule of law between civilized nations.”
“He is a Nazi,” Stanton insisted. “Negotiating with Nazis didn’t prove useful in 1939. It won’t now either.”
When world leaders gather for the G7 Summit in Canada, among them will be a man who has repeatedly argued that the host country should not exist as a free and sovereign nation—that its very foundation was a historical accident, and one that demands correction via annexation. Genocide Watch is among those urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to reconsider the invite. (Global Affairs Canada, which manages the country's diplomatic relations, declined to comment.)
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The White House itself says Trump's threats are no joke, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt describing Canada as the “soon-to-be 51st state.” Carney’s predecessor also insisted that his American counterpart was deadly serious.
“Mr. Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country,” former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told business leaders earlier this year, saying he’s after the country’s mineral wealth and that his threats to annex the country are “a real thing.”
Why, then, would you invite someone like that — someone who has insulted you and threatened to take all you hold dear — into your home? Does that project strength, to a bully? Will it be interpreted as such?
In 2014, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the world’s leading economies decided that it was no longer worth inviting Vladimir Putin to have tea and scones at the now-defunct G8; diplomacy in the decade before, clung to as the only means of preventing another armed conflict on European soil, had through the mirage of steady engagement blinded Western leaders to the possibility of an imminent war and soothed consciences as they deepened their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.
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Trump is today lobbying for Russia’s return to the G7/G8 because, perhaps, he recognizes something that America’s erstwhile allies do not: that there is no difference, morally speaking, between the White House and the Kremlin, both of which desire a world where lip service to universal truths (and rights and wrongs) is dropped in favor of vulgar, thuggish self-interest, pursued without apology.
It is not easy to accept that “it” is actually happening here — that the descent into right-wing authoritarianism could be so rapid, the institutions of democracy so weak, the orchestrator of it all such an obvious and venal perversion of the American ideal — and harder still to quit one’s economic dependence on a superpower, however much it may be imploding. But, a decade from now, it might also be hard to believe that countries didn’t pursue their own rational self-interest and isolate a man who befriended their enemies, threatened their homes and sent their citizens to Guantánamo Bay.
“We will not allow people to enter our country who wish to do us harm,” Trump said when issuing his latest, sweeping travel ban, barring people from a dozen countries from ever setting foot in the former land of the free. The rest of the world, recognizing that fascism entails projection, might now wish to consider their own security.
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