Mr. Trump seems to see tanks as a symbol of military strength, of America’s ability to bend the world to its will by means of brute force and threats of “fire and fury.” Having avoided service in the Vietnam War by way of draft deferments, Mr. Trump has presumably never been closer to warfare than has a child playing on the floor with toy tanks and green plastic army men.
When your Persian rug is the battlefield, the tank does appear invincible. But American soldiers today are not fighting our enemies in our living rooms.
On the actual battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, troops have been fighting local insurgencies and international jihadists who have perfected the art of the roadside bomb, but whose real strength lies in their mastery of the human terrain, winning “hearts and minds.” On this battlefield — the contested ground of policing and politics that endures years after the guns fall silent — tanks have no role. And this is the battlefield on which the United States has been losing.
We’re also fighting our enemies in cyberspace, where our defenses are notoriously weak. Tank pageantry ignores our vulnerabilities in the face of cyberthreats that go far beyond Russian interference in American elections. In 2011, Iran’s cyberwarfare unit hacked an American drone, landed it and went on to reverse-engineer it. North Korean hackers are trying to attack critical American infrastructure like banks, utilities and energy companies. Mr. Trump is conspicuously quiet about those threats, against which tanks, jets, warships and drones are powerless.
Mr. Trump’s fondness for tanks is part of the insidious nostalgia that undergirds his entire “Make America Great Again” ideology. It evokes a “simpler” time, when Gen. George Patton’s tanks saved the world from the Nazis, when winning the Cold War meant winning the arms race — a time before the Vietnam War forced the country to question the morality and wisdom of its “defense” industry, before an increasingly skeptical media revealed the truth about the My Lai massacre, the Iran-contra affair and torture at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Trump has promised his followers that he can take them back to that time — and they seem ready to believe him.
Mr. Trump is a wannabe strongman, and no doubt he sees in the tank what all strongmen see in tanks: a weapon to be used against his enemies, foreign or domestic. Though tanks over the past half century have been used only rarely in their strategic combat role, they have been used often to repress popular uprisings — a tool of practical and psychological warfare against unarmed civilians from the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union to Tiananmen Square. By displaying tanks in our nation’s capital, Mr. Trump signals that he is willing to use the military for personal political purposes, as he did in May when the White House asked the Navy to hide the U.S.S. John McCain during his trip to Japan.
Apparently, during Thursday’s Fourth of July celebration, Mr. Trump’s cherished tanks will have to be stationed in a “static display,” because driving them into position would damage Washington’s streets. A stationary display is all too fitting, for it is the most common posture of tanks on the modern battlefield. Like President Trump’s false promises, they won’t be going anywhere.
Elliott D. Woods ( @elliottwoods) is a contributing editor at VQR and a correspondent for Outside magazine. |
