'American Values' Vs What Trump Values

During a recent visit to America in the first week of March, I was rummaging, as is my wont, through my hostess’ bookshelves. And, I spotted Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Re-reading this 1955 classic in a very voluble and cantankerous Donald Trump’s America makes an unsettling experience and invites a thought that perhaps as president, in his second term, he has finally moved the US from its institutionalised hypocrisy of the last seven decades.

Let us recall that Greene’s story-teller is a cynical, opium-addict British journalist named Thomas Fowler, and his gentle antagonist, Alden Pyle, is a young, idealistic American, (hinted to be a CIA— Central Intelligence Agency—operative) in Indo-China at a time when the French colonial authority is tottering under a relentless violent insurrection from the Communists in the North. Using the novelist’s license of creative storytelling, Greene lays bare the American intellectual and ideological presumptiveness that propelled Washington to take over from the French the burden of keeping Vietnam away from the Communists, and making it safe for democracy.

The young American is “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance”. And, this ignorance was dangerous. “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” But there was harm. Grievous harm. Violent harm.

The hard-boiled Brit, who has been around for a long time in the region and knows the local landscape, its cultural nuances and the treacherous by-lanes of its revolutionary politics, is telling the American: “You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who are just not interested. They do not want communism. They want enough rice.”

He mockingly recites the liturgy of the American doctrine of domino theory: “I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does “go” mean?”

The Brit’s scepticism is lost on his antagonist, Pyle, who was obviously reflecting Washington’s group-think. The domino theory was eventually to become the raison d’être for “the best and the brightest” in the Kennedy Court to inveigle the US in conflict after conflict. Millions of patriotic citizens spread across various countries resisted the Americans’ ideas and policies mistakenly aimed at containing the spread of Communism.

The Brit wanted the young American to understand the strength and the powerful hold of nationalism on the Vietnamese people. Like all colonial powers, the French too believed that their rule was benevolent and beneficial and would outweigh any nationalist urges and ambitions. Now, the Americans were stumbling into the same dead-end. Exasperatedly, the seasoned Brit reminds the American that all outsiders, who wanted to do good by the Vietnamese people, should remember: “It is their country.”

Greene, the novelist, was impressively prescient in decoding the American arrogance and ignorance. A whole generation of American men and women got scarred because of Washington’s infatuations and follies in Vietnam. Still, successive American presidents went on to devote themselves to making the world safe for the democracy project. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. All futile ventures, all took a heavy toll on the American sense of civilisational certitude.

And, now comes a re-branded president who does not give a fig about democracy. He is distinctly disinclined to take on the responsibility for making the world safe for democracy; rather, Trump is wantonly trying to rattle and weaken the most established democracies in Europe and Canada. For Trump, American democracy—as revered and cherished by most Americans over the three centuries—is itself only a mixed blessing.

Trump is not—decidedly not—driven by any desire to devote American energies and imagination to work for “the common good of mankind,” a theme eloquently spelled out so many times by John F. Kennedy during his short-lived presidency. Nor is Trump interested in wanting to roll back or slow down any feeling of anti-Americanism among foes and friends alike.

Greene’s The Quiet American earnestly believes in the desirability of the American mission. He tells his British interlocutor that once the Communists took over, the Vietnamese people would lose their freedom of speech. “They would be forced to believe what they are told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves.” This invites a sardonic retort from the Brit: “Thought is a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”

Trump, his ‘co-president’, Elon Musk and his vice president, J. D. Vance, would most certainly find themselves in agreement with the unbelieving Brit. It is of no concern to the US whether the Iranians or the Chinese or the Russians find themselves having to believe whatever spiel their rulers were dishing out to them. The Trump clique believes that Washington need not get involved in inevitable battles between the rulers—good, bad, or ugly—and their hapless citizens. This retreat from the ramparts of ideas—democracy, good governance, human rights and liberal values—is perhaps as consequential as Trump’s stated use of the threat of military power and economic heft to enrich American business elites.

It was, then, no surprise that on March 14, Trump should have signed an executive order slashing funding for the United States Agency for Global Media. This simply means crippling of the US-funded news outlets like the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe. These were the most visible instruments for the spread of “American values”. And, these “values” were deemed, by three generations of American strategic experts, as intrinsic to US “influence” in the good old days of the Cold War. Many lives were lost, reputations unmade and careers destroyed as the Americans—and the Russians—sought to trick, manipulate and recruit the “intelligentsia” in the battlefield countries like India. Those were the days of a superpower’s struggle for “hearts and minds” across the globe.

Till recently, the Voice of America was seen by the “rulers” as the voice of subversion and instability whereas the “insurgents” and the “dissidents” sought validation of their “struggle” from words of support and endorsement from this propaganda outlet, as various colour revolutions brought about regime change in several countries. The Chinese authorities, for example, remain most resentful of the Voice of America’s role in fomenting unrest in Hong Kong during 2019-20.

It is possible that the Trump White House’s primary purpose in dismantling these tools of propaganda was a belief that these outfits were staffed with liberals. Whatever. The only inference the world can draw is that an American president is shouting from the rooftop that Washington is no longer interested in joining any global battle for influence. This will be seen as a welcome step by all the current despots and potential dictators.

Of all people, Greene’s Alden Pyle will be at a loss to make sense of Trump’s America and its obsession with a quixotic notion of “greatness”.

(Views expressed are personal)

Harish Khare is a Delhi-based senior journalist and public commentator