Deterrence through ruthlessness
I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”
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Is the White House destroying people’s lives due to incompetence or because it’s overly eager to manufacture a public consensus that the president should be able to do anything he likes so long as he utters the magic words “Tren de Aragua”?
Another Trumpian hallmark of the missile strike is the proposition it stands for, that there’s no national problem that can’t be solved with more ruthlessness. The uniparty may have been content to have the Coast Guard interdict drug smugglers, arrest them, and confiscate their cargo, but that obviously wasn’t enough to cure America’s drug addiction. What else can the president do, then, except start summarily executing people who may or may not be guilty and trust that other drug dealers will recalculate the risk of trafficking to the U.S. accordingly?
Deterrence through terror has always been Trump’s answer to major social ills. In his first months as a candidate in 2015 he recommended killing jihadis’ families to make them think twice. As president he reportedly fantasized about building a moat along the border stocked with alligators, electrifying the wall, and shooting immigrants in the legs whenever they’re caught in the act of crossing over. He allegedly once congratulated Rodrigo Duterte on his notoriously bloody campaign against drug-dealing in the Philippines and told an audience on the campaign trail last year that America’s crime problem could be solved by letting police have one “real rough” hour with suspects.
“The word will get out” after the bloodletting is over, the president imagined, and the crime wave “will end immediately.” Deterrence through terror: That’s his approach to domestic politics and to immigration, so why wouldn’t it be his approach to drug-trafficking too?
On Wednesday Rubio went as far as to admit that the U.S. could have intercepted the Venezuelan ship instead of incinerating it but that doing so wouldn’t have packed the same deterrent punch, which I suppose is true in the same way that Trump’s “one rough hour” scenario is true. If you want to discourage crime, letting cops shoot suspects in the head in lieu of arresting them would do the job more efficiently.