Late last week, after Trump’s whirlwind tour of the Middle East, NBC news reported that the administration was negotiating with Libya to remove one million Palestinians from Gaza and relocate them in the war-torn north African country.
Since Libya’s total population is just over seven million, NBC pointed out that this was equivalent, proportionately, to the US suddenly absorbing an additional 46 million people into its population. Even a country as well-resourced and relatively stable as the US would struggle mightily to absorb an overnight increase of 15 percent to its population. But, despite its oil reserves, most of Libya’s population isn’t wealthy, and it certainly isn’t stable: in the wake of strong-man leader Gaddafi being toppled and killed in October 2011 it has been a hotbed of civil unrest, and is currently effectively cleaved in two, with two regionally based governments vying for overall control of the country.
SFR
Relocating one million people from one war-ravaged land to another is hardly offering the Palestinians a fresh start. Moreover, the proposal is being worked on without any input from the Palestinians themselves, making it essentially a plan for a forced removal from ancestral lands—a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
None of this is simply a matter of semantics. Since World War II, the world’s diplomats have painstakingly woven a set of international norms that, broadly, provide a template for the great powers to follow. America’s approach to international affairs has, at least in theory, been based on respect for these norms.
Of course, in reality these norms are followed at best imperfectly, and violations are routine—be they China’s brutal treatment of the Uighur Muslims, or Myanmar’s military campaigns against the Rohingya population.
And anyone who has read history with an even remotely critical eye will know that America’s involvement on the international stage in these decades has been far from clean, its respect for human rights and for international law at best an exercise in selective enforcement. Time and again, the US has cast these values to one side to embrace violent means in pursuit of politically expedient ends—be it the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia or the support for the Indonesian military’s mass slaughter of suspected communists; be it support for the Death Squads of Central America in the 1980s or CIA assistance overthrowing democratically elected regimes in Iran and Guatemala during the 1950s, the Dominican Republic and the Congo in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s.
In one sense, the Libya plan is simply a continuation of this expediency: it gifts Netanyahu’s hard-right Israeli government, which has its own expansionist priorities, a method of depopulating Gaza—an outcome that, increasingly, seems to be the end-goal animating the continued military operations there. But in another sense, it marks a fundamental break with recent diplomatic history, an explicit embrace of forced displacement by a country that helped craft the international laws that ban this very practice.
There’s nothing particularly novel about any of this. It’s the morally threadbare language of practically every imperial fever dream in history. Look at the Great Power pow-wows of the past, and one frequently sees imperial leaders and their aides sitting down and redrawing maps and boundaries and population concentrations to reflect their geopolitical priorities. Look at many of today’s crises in the Middle East, for example, and one can see their origins in the negotiations over the spoils between victorious empires at the end of World War I. Look at many of the more bloody conflicts in Africa today and one sees ghosts of imperial rivalries from bygone times. Look at the India-Pakistan tensions today, and, again, at least in part one sees the legacy of the forced population displacements following the partition of the Raj as the British empire wound down.
That the Trump team is reputedly negotiating about the future of the Palestinian people without actually involving the Palestinian people themselves in those conversations should surprise no one. Trump 2.0 is as close to an explicitly imperial project, at least rhetorically, as any American presidency since the Teddy Roosevelt years. The language Trump uses in talking about the need to acquire Greenland “one way or the other,” and about the United States’ destiny in annexing Canada to form a single continental mega-country, or that Elon Musk uses in discussing colonizing Mars, is essentially the same as that of the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who, in the late 19th century, once famously stated that he would conquer the stars and the planets if he could.
When Trump talks about sitting down with Putin mano-y-mano and hashing out a deal to end the war in Ukraine, he is essentially proposing to the Russians a real estate carve-up that would come with Great Power spheres of influence—you take eastern Ukraine, we take Ukrainian minerals; we give you the nod on expansion in your backyard, you give us the nod to pressure Denmark over Greenland and Canada over… Canada.
Maybe Trump’s just more honest than previous American presidents; they talked in a language of high ideals but then got down-and-dirty in practice. MAGA-man has, simply, dispensed with even the language of high ideals. There’s no pretense for Trump: however, sordid the deal, at the end of the day it’s simply all about the bottom line.
