America’s new visa policies are shocking, everyone agrees on that. Even Donald Trump’s administration calls its US entry vetting ‘extreme’. But before everyone calls Trump a fascist again, before everyone reaches once more for the Hitler and the Nazis comparisons, consider this: Trump’s ‘America First’ nationalism is defensive, not aggressive. It may be clumsy, it may be offensive, and it will of course be unfair on lots of immigrants. But it is not war-mongering. In this respect, Trump is very different to the post 9-11 George W Bush. He is also different to Barack Obama, who wanted peace but whose internationalism inevitably dragged him into more disastrous conflicts.
Poor Theresa May is getting a hard time for having dealt with the devil by visiting Trump last week. But one of the most cheering aspects the ‘renewed’ UK-US Special Relationship is that both May and Trump agree that western interventions in the Muslim world have failed, and are not the way forward. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, our well-meaning leaders have caused more pain and suffering than any visa ban ever could. The war on terror must be fought in a different way.
Trump’s foreign policy, it is increasingly clear, is being directed by Steve Bannon, who now has a seat on the national security council. Bannon seems driven by a psychotic desire to drive the liberal-left mad — in fairness, it is working— and a nasty, pathological hatred of Islam. The man who turned Breitbart into what it is today is now one of the most influential people on earth. In Trumpland, the neocons are out and Islamophobia is in. This is not good news.
But an extremist defence of the sovereignty — even if it does come with lots of overheated rhetoric about terrorists — is preferable to a liberal internationalism that has only made the world more dangerous. I would rather have an America that protected its borders to the point of being illiberal to one that kept blowing up the Middle East in the name of freedom and democracy. Wouldn’t you?
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