In the 2016 election cycle, Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, alone among all the Republican contenders, campaigned on strong nationalist promises to deal with America’s long-standing, nearly untrammeled invasion by foreign nationals, so as to preserve all of America’s sovereignty, demographic integrity, economic and fiscal stability, and the rule of law. This week, President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced that the federal government will act to withhold federal funds from those American cities whose mayors have declared them “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens, refusing to cooperate with the feds in detaining and holding them for possible deportation.
The mayors’ refusal to abide by duly enacted federal immigration laws – whose legitimacy and authority under the Constitution’s allocation of powers is beyond dispute – is the opening gambit in what will certainly be a raft of “official” acts of civil disobedience that will plague this nation and threaten its cohesiveness. America is under threat today from a plethora of vectors, many of them (but certainly not all) domestic.
It is manifestly obvious that the United States is a vastly polarized nation today, and the schisms in thinking are both deep and deepening and, to this writer’s mind, fundamentally irreconcilable. The traditional paradigm of American society – a federal constitutional republic under the rule of law and rights, with strong sovereignty, a coherent societal culture, a cohesive moral consensus, and widely accepted norms of decent behavior – is increasingly being challenged by a globalist, statist, multiculturalist worldview that simultaneously celebrates personal licentiousness, ever greater centralized governmental power, balkanized cultural and moral identities, open borders, and diminished national structures and consciousness. This is a recipe for a clean civil cleaving, whether driven peaceably or violently, as such wildly divergent paradigms simply cannot long coexist within the same polity. Apart from recent fracases erupting between various elements of the civilian population (e.g., blacks vs. law enforcement), when most of the elites in academia, the media, and popular culture disavow the nation’s founding memes and themes, and state and local authorities begin to flout the federal government’s legitimate authority to control national borders and determine who may enter and stay within them, we are only marking time before there is a cataclysm of cyclonic proportions. And that would be so even if the nation were not being threatened from without, as the United States today clearly is, from several sources.
And so America today is at huge risk of civil unrest. Now that spring is here and temperatures can be expected to warm all across the nation, the likelihood of protest marches, shutdowns, and violent demonstrations against various of Trump’s coming initiatives about immigration, border control, refugee resettlement, energy, “women’s rights”, and perhaps even gun rights and Israel, will grow apace. Hard-left agitators, with the complicity of Democratic leadership cadres in both D.C. and the states who have decided to become actively obstructionist, will ensure that there will be militant responses to all federal Republican attempts to revitalize America culturally and economically. And how Trump’s pantheon of government agencies, civil and military, respond to such heavy provocation will determine just how long and how durably our society can cohere as a free nation.
And then there are the rising threats from overseas. The scourge of Islamism — the theocratic political driver of Islam focused on jihad/conquest, submission/domination, and supremacism – will remain acute from both foreign sources (viz., ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran) and domestically resident, radicalized adherents. The prospect of more, and ever more heinous, attacks in the mold of the Orlando, San Bernardino, and Boston Marathon atrocities will heighten as U.S. and other forces are successful in annihilating IS in Iraq and Syria, and if Israel is forced to engage militarily once again with Hamas and/or Hezbollah in Gaza and/or Lebanon. In all events, the covert connivance of Iran in helping to orchestrate terror attacks within the United States also cannot be discounted. More than likely, any Islamist attack on the homeland will incentivize leftist religious and political groups to provide overt succor to Muslims in the United States in the form of support rallies, and perhaps even shelter from anticipated retaliation, all in the name of a supposedly enlightened “tolerance” and love of “diversity.”
However, perhaps the biggest menace in the near offing to America’s overall national security and internal stability is North Korea, whose virulent anti-Americanism is a signal hallmark of its brutal Stalinist regime. Ominously, there is reason to believe that its psychopathic absolute ruler, Kim Jong-Un, might be inclined to launch a nuclear attack on the United States without notice, based on mere paranoia. Apart from the obvious physical destruction a successful attack could wreak on the American homeland, the follow-on dislocation of people and indefinite interruption of vital support infrastructure and reliable civil authority (police, fire, emergency medical) could potentially be even more catastrophic
While the United States and South Korea are now conducting a routine military exercise that involves the mobilizing of thousands of troops, for the first time the U.S. has deployed missile defenses to protect its ally from possible North Korean nuclear strikes. B-52 nuclear bombers will fly into South Korea. The focus of the war game is preemptive warfare to prevent North Korea from launching nuclear missiles, including by use of American nuclear first strikes against North Korean forces and leadership. However, North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-Un, is actually threatening preemptive nuclear war.
Pyongyang (North Korea’s capital) is wrongly declaring, as it does every year during routine U.S.-South Korean military exercises, that these are not war games but rather, this time, a real impending U.S. surprise attack. Recently, North Korea fired four missiles that splashed down in the sea close to Japan, a rehearsal for nuclear strikes against U.S. bases, according to Pyongyang.
Kim’s mental illness is such that he is so suspicious of his own followers that he is now purging his political and military elites, inventing new, sadistic ways of killing even his close relatives in positions of power. Such serious paranoia is exactly the type of mania that could start a nuclear war. Because Kim sees North Korea as being in a chronic nuclear crisis with the United States, always on the verge of nuclear war, he may well believe that North Korea’s missiles need not be perfected via full testing before deploying them operationally. As well, to the extent that North Korea’s two satellites now orbiting over the U.S are nuclear-armed, they could be the launching pad for an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could black out all of North America and ultimately result in the death of millions of people.
The United States is thus facing an unusual mélange of acute threats to its domestic society today. And so President Trump faces the daunting task of dealing with them while preserving and protecting Americans’ liberty as well as the nation’s cultural integrity, economic viability, and constitutional governance under law. Not to mention the nation’s territorial borders against a continuing invasion by aliens of many nationalities, some of whom have malevolent intentions.
No doubt a modern Rubicon will soon be crossed.
Former CIA director Ambassador R. James Woolsey and Peter Vincent Pry, Ph.D., an expert in ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) threats, contributed via reportage to this piece.