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In Casablanca, a movie first released in 1942, the protagonists gathered in Rick’s Café Americain are desperately trying to reach America where they will be safe from fascism, violence and corruption. Their expectations may have been exaggerated at the time, but until recently much of the world bought into this idealised version of the US because it had at least some substance.
This benign perception was the basis of American “soft power”, the belief that the US was – with many reservations – a force for good in the world, a view which made it a cultural and political superpower.
This image was reinforced by the extraordinary cultural dominance achieved by American films (of which Casablanca is a prime example) as well as television and popular music. The US was seen as a country where most people in the world felt they would be happy to live, even if they did not take practical measures to go there.
But two years into Donald Trump’s second term this once huge American advantage in “soft power” is swiftly disappearing like an iceberg melting in warm water. Trump and his lieutenants are furiously attacking all that was best in American government and society, replacing it with a cruelty and lawlessness.
The latest grotesque example of this is the plan to livestream the military execution of major Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, on 3 December. The public execution brings the US into line with Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, and it is only a step behind Islamic State which filmed decapitations and dowsing victims with fuel before setting them ablaze.
State violence and illegality is the norm in the age of Trump. Screens across the world showed ICE agents pump bullets into non-violent protesters in Minneapolis and the arbitrary killing of fishermen in the Caribbean, alleged without evidence to be drug smugglers, their boats targeted by missiles and survivors finished off by a second strike as they struggled in the water.
Immigrants with the legal right to stay in the US are snatched away from their families, incarcerated, shackled and flown to countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, which they do not come from and cannot speak the language. Trump boasts of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and assassinating the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Casablanca, appearing on film screens just after the US had joined the war in Europe, was an early and highly influential promoter of American “soft power”. Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the hard-bitten, cynical and egocentric American who nonetheless chooses the good of others and the world over love and self-interest. The overall message is of America as saviour and refuge for Europeans in terrible trouble.
Today this all looks grossly out of if the fictional would-be-immigrants carousing at Rick’s to keep their spirits up were to enter the US today, supposing they got that far, they would find much in the new world that reminded them horribly of the worst of the old. The Czech resistance hero Victor Laszlo and his wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) might be given permission to enter the US and stay as a well-known public figure. But his record of anti-fascist activities, and his year in a German concentration camp, might well see him labelled as a terrorist and sent back to Prague.
A famous scene in the movie has Rick saving a Bulgarian woman from having to sleep with the corrupt French police chief Captain Louis Renault in return for exit visas, by arranging for her husband to win enough money at a rigged roulette table to pay for the visas. But since she says they want to go to the US simply to have a better life they might not be allowed in and could well be repatriated, suitably shackled, back to Bulgaria.
A sense of corruption and sleaziness pervades the movie. The opening scene is of a pickpocket warning a British man against thieves – “vultures, vultures everywhere” – as he deftly steals his wallet. Rick keeps his nightclub/casino open by allowing Renault to win at roulette. The main action revolves around possession of stolen “letters of transit”, enabling travel anywhere and stolen from two murdered German couriers and given to Rick by an underworld figure Signor Ugarte (Peter Lorre) shortly before he is arrested and later shot.
The assumption in Casablanca is that everybody and everything is for sale for the right price. Without being too dewy-eyed about past US governments, the range of accusations levelled at this administration is breathtaking. The anti-corruption monitoring group Transparency International provides a long list of actions by the Trump administration which foster and protect corrupt measures, including “disbanding anti-kleptocracy and asset recovery offices, dismissing public officials who monitor and report on corruption”.
Following the current trajectory, Casablanca might be America’s future. A New York Times investigation published in September laid out how two deals – one a $2bn (£1.5bn) investment by a company run by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the ruling family of the UAE, into World Liberty Financial, a crypto company started by members of the Trump family and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The other a deal to allow the UAE access to American computer chips – had, the paper said, “blurred the lines between personal and government business”. The White House, meanwhile, said the crypto deal was “totally unrelated to any government business”.
American voters may not have been so naive as to believe Trump’s promises “to drain the swamp in Washington”, but they probably did not suspect he would, as the Financial Times reports, earn at least $2.2bn (£1.6bn) during his first year in office, more than triple his reported income for the previous year.
US “soft power” was cumulatively built up over the past century, but is now dissolving by the hour. Some might argue that America was never as good as it purported to be, but there was much goodness there all the same.
That said, the overly attractive and partially mythical picture of the US purveyed for so long leaves Americans and foreigners alike in a state of shock at the abrupt crumbling of a society that messianically aspired to be “the shining city on a hill”, an example to the rest of the world. Political and cultural polarisation is lamented daily as if it were a recent phenomenon, but goes back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
It produced one the world’s most savage civil wars between 1861 and 1865, with some 750,000 dead. Slavery and race provided the crucial ingredients for division then, and today provide the essence of Trumpism – though it has a vast and complex root system – which boils down to male white supremacy.
In my experience, even those Europeans familiar with the US seldom have an accurate idea of what made it tick. They ignore the impact of its diversity and internal conflicts, which have obvious negative consequences, but they also provide the friction that generates immense political and cultural energy.
This creativity and resilience might just be enough to defeat Trumpism, which truly embodies the dark side of America past and present.
Further thoughts
Who controls the Strait of Hormuz? Will the high price of oil and the soaring price of diesel play a role in the US midterm elections? Unlike 1973, the current oil crisis is not a single explosive event so much as a slow burn disaster that inexorably pushes the centre of gravity of the international order upwards, making it ever more unstable.
More oil is coming out of the Gulf, despite escalating Iranian missile and drone attacks in September. Has Iran lost control of the strait, and is enough oil being moved by pipelines and other means to provide the world with adequate supplies? If so, why is the price of Brent crude still hovering around the $100 a barrel mark?
The effort made to get the oil through the strait is impressive – and horrendously expensive: tanker captains in the Gulf are paid $100,000 (£75,580) a month and a bonus of $50,000 (£37,775) for each time they transit the strait. Ordinary seamen get four to six times their usual rather low rate of pay, according to the Financial Times. Freight rates for cargoes going through the strait have had a meteoric rise from between $20,000 ($15,112) and $50,000 (£37,775) per day last year to $1.2m (£0.9m) per day now. A super tanker carrying two million barrels of oil may pay as much as $20m (£15m) per voyage for war risk insurance.
The US provides intelligence and air defence against Iranian missile and drone attack, but this is not the prime reason why oil is flowing out of the Gulf. The Iranians are hitting vessels, but the rewards for getting through are sufficiently high for oil producers to risk it.
They fear that after the US midterm elections, the US, possibly in alliance with Israel, might resume full scale war with Iran – and the Iranians might strike back at oil refineries and oil export terminals like Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. In other words, their watchword is “get your oil out while you still can”.
What is most striking is the sheer fragility and uncertainty of future oil supplies from the Gulf and the Red Sea. So many things could disrupt them: Iraqi militias or the Houthis might again attack the East-West oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. At the start of the war, the world was surprised when Iran took control of the Strait of Hormuz, but in reality this control is wider as today all the Arab countries on the south side of the Gulf are under the Iranian gun.
Moreover, some shipping analysts say oil tankers may be passing safely through the strait safely only because they are paying protection money to Iran of between 10 and 20 per cent of cargo value. There is no proof of this, but it is the sort of tricksy arrangement that Iran and its neighbours might agree to at a time when they all want to boost their oil revenues.
Beneath the radar
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch proposes to build the “Britannia Shield”, a new system to defend the UK against ballistic missiles and drones – and all this for £10bn spread over 10 years, combining new radars, command systems and interceptor missiles.
This might have been dismissed as a party conference headline grabber, had it not unwittingly exposed open ignorance about how military attack and defence have been transformed by the lessons of the Ukraine and Gulf wars. Cut-price defence of the UK is being announced just as real wars are proving that even vast expenditure cannot stop precision-guided missiles and drones getting through.
The heavily-defended US naval base for Fifth Fleet in Bahrain has by all accounts been wrecked from end to end by Iranian attacks and may never be rebuilt. Saudi Arabia, for all its enormous defence expenditure, cannot protect its oil refineries and pipelines from the Houthis and Iraqi militias.
In Ukraine and the Gulf, cheap drone and precision guided missiles have upended the traditional balance between great and smaller powers. Trump kept absurdly announcing that the Iranian navy and air force were finished – as if that mattered in this day and age.
But just because this is a defence policy is stupid does not mean it will not happen. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) commonly known as “Star Wars”, whereby the US would be defended from Soviet nuclear missiles by an anti-missile defence based in space.
Some years later, I met a Czech scientist in Prague who had formerly been working for the Pentagon in the US on atomic fusion and its possible uses. When Reagan announced SDI, my Czech friend and other fusion scientists were abruptly informed by the US Defence Department that their scientific programmes were being closed down and they must all go and work on space-based missile defence – about which they knew nothing.
Many threw up their jobs but others pretended to be seeking to make Reagan’s fantasy a reality. My friend had to return to Europe to keep working on fusion.
Cockburn’s picks
The most intelligent analysis I have read on the foolish motion of the Green Party equating Zionism with racism – doing nothing but damage to the Palestinians and helping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defend his toxic policies – is in David Aaronovitch’s piece aptly titled “The Anti-Zionism of Fools”.
He concludes: “To watch people celebrating the passage of a motion whose very extremism strengthens the forces to whom they are most opposed, is sad… So all the Greens have accomplished is to lay the ground for a series of domestic rows and incidents which will end in them reversing the policy or the party splitting, or both.”
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