Some years ago, I wrote a fictionalized account of my experiences in Vietnam and of its historical background. Recently, a new reader found the following passage relevant to the Turkish invasion of the Kurds’ settlements in Syria.

“There was hatred in those eyes . . . If they were staring over the barrel of a rifle, there was no doubt in Regis’ (my protagonist’s) mind that he would be a dead man . . . These NVA soldiers had marched half the length of Vietnam through bombing raids and cluster mine fields, avoided search and destroy squads along the way, and now found themselves captured and forced to work for an invading army that they had sworn to eliminate from their land. Had Regis lived through as much, would he not be like these angry young men?” ¹

While President Trump talks about “happy Turks” and “happy Kurds,” we are witnessing an ongoing assault under cover of an alleged cease-fire. The Trump-Erdogan agreement has no third-party assurance of a safe zone. What will prevent the atrocities that are sure to follow as the Arab militia, comprised of many Il Qaeda and ISIS radicals, fall upon the receding Kurds. This invasion does more than “clean out” Kurdish rebels on Turkey’s border, as President Trump suggested. Rather, it incites a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign and a reactive violent resistance that will cost many lives, create thousands of homeless refugees, and likely stir anew the conflict between the many warring parties in Syria. Like the Vietnam War where a million Vietnamese lost their lives, the Kurds will fight to the death. Our President now accuses our former allies, the Kurds, of being “more of a terrorist threat” than ISIS. But the Kurds fought ISIS in our name, as well as for their own homeland. In the process they rescued an ethnic Christian community from genocide and formed a budding democratic community with full gender equality. Now they face a very real existential threat. Fortunately for President Trump, he will never face the “hatred in those eyes” of a betrayed and vanquished people.

It is unfortunately true that Presidents have led America into disastrous international wars before. President Johnson turned away Ho Chi Minh’s request for assistance in throwing off the yoke of colonialism. He was a nationalist before he was a communist and thought the democratic republic of America would assist him in his revolution against a foreign imperialist power. Instead, President Johnson ordered our Marines to conduct a Normandy style invasion of the seaside city of Da Nang. The citizens of that coastal town watched in some bewilderment as foreign soldiers scoured their town with drawn weapons. Merchants continued to ply their wares. Men and women casually walked past the anomaly of western soldiers looking for an enemy. In my mind’s eye, I can see the incongruity of Vietnamese women dressed in immaculately white silk pants and colorful ao dai outer garments as they paraded past these sopping wet Marines who had just “stormed” the welcoming white sands of their beaches. The irony of this scene is dramatically underscored by the devastation and bloodshed that followed.

Decades later—and just a week after Saddam Hussein finally admitted he had no nuclear weapons—President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. Just as President Johnson was convinced that Vietnam could become a communist threat to the American world order, President Bush was persuaded that Iraq could be a nuclear threat to America and its allies. Once again, American leadership erred and misled American soldiers into a disastrous campaign that resulted in over a million deaths, the birth of Il Qaeda, and the riling of many Middle Eastern factions. America’s involvement in both these Southeast Asia and Middle East wars spurred other conflicts that eventually embroiled Cambodia and Syria. Would there have been the Khmer Rouge or Il Qaeda/ISIS scourge without America’s mindless agency? Perhaps, but would it have been as heinous and widespread? Not likely.

The difference between President Trump’s action and that of his predecessors is that the latter acted in behalf of perceived American interest: prohibiting the advance of communism and of nuclear proliferation. And they did not act alone. They may have been mistaken, but so were their Administrations and the state allies that joined them. History is filled with miscalculations that resulted in catastrophes and the deaths of innocents. But our current President acts without consultation, on a whim, and without support of NATO or any of our traditional allies. A late-night phone call with a self-styled dictator was his only justification for the ethnic cleansing of our Kurdish allies from the homeland they established astride the Turkish border. Could America and its European allies have intervened to assuage Erdogan’s concerns about Kurdish rebels in eastern Turkey? But our President gave no thought to any form of diplomatic intervention or to America’s alliance with the Syrian Kurds. Without aforethought, he unleashed the gates of hell upon the Kurds.

I seem to recall that Henry Kissinger once confessed that “sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils.” But he never conceded the moronic position that they undermine their country’s interests in the process. And yet Donald Trump continues to subvert America’s interests in favor of Vladimir Putin’s. In just the last two weeks his actions attempt to cede Eastern Ukraine and Syrian dominance to Russia. His extortion of President Zelensky has resulted in an agreement with Russia to hold another national referendum for Eastern Ukraine secession. This Putin-inspired gambit has been tried before. Previous votes have either not supported secession or been found illegal by the international community. And our President’s flash decision to abandon our alliance with the Kurds against ISIS has already encouraged Russia to take control of American bases in eastern Syria. As the Speaker of the House recently questioned the President, “why do all roads with you lead to Putin?”

Moreover, President Trump has positioned America as an international outlaw that not only violates the United Nations convention on asylum seekers² but also enables the genocide another UN convention roundly condemns³. He denies asylum seekers due process and further deters their request by interning their children. And he betrays our allies-in-arms to ethnic cleansing, while unleashing the very ISIS terrorists our alliance either vanquished or imprisoned. Whether it is at our border where he breaks up families escaping violence and devastation or abandons allies to brutalization and annihilation, he displays the same consistency in illogic and inhumanity. From whence does he arrive his so-called “unmatched wisdom?” It certainly does not come from our Constitution, international conventions, or any knowledge of history. And whose welfare does he seek? It most certainly cannot be asylum seekers, Kurdish allies, or the safety of Americans from the threat of terrorists.

President Trump conceals “love letters” with Kim Jung Un and many secret phone calls with Vladimir Putin and, more recently, with Erdogan. Does he want Kim Jung Un to respond to his vision of building a resort along the North Korean coast? Does he still harbor the ambition to build a Trump tower in Moscow? Or is he merely afraid of losing the Russian financial support no American institution would grant his real estate business? Do his many financial links to Turkey explain his obeisance to Erdogan’s phone request for American troops abandonment of the Syrian border to a Turkish invasion? In truth, nothing in his relations with these totalitarian leaders has benefited the United States in any way whatsoever. Plainly, as any American should ask, whose interest does President Trump serve?

Indeed, Donald Trump has not even served the interests of his aggrieved supporters. How has he made their lives better? Moreover, he never addresses the general welfare of all Americans. Take note of his policies governing healthcare, tax breaks for the wealthy, infrastructure repair, public education funding, climate change mitigation, tariff wars, and so on. Rather than benefit the general public, these “policies” disregard the general welfare of Americans. In fact, his actions most often only display self-interest: in protecting his Trump Towers in Turkey; in defending his Russian financial benefactors; and in providing real estate tax breaks for his business. And now, as the impeachment inquiry clearly demonstrates, he would rather use the powers of his office to align other state actors with his self-interest, rather than America’s.

Finally, the issue of impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors or for violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses may be secondary to more immediate concerns. Nearly every day we see his capacity for chaos and poor judgment. The urgency of the moment demands that Congress impeach and remove him from office as soon as possible. Remember his threat of “fire and fury,” his promise “to end Iran,” or the destruction of Afghanistan “in ten days.” Consider what he might do next, perhaps in a rage, or just as a whim. We can impeach him for what he has already done. But we must impeach him for what he can do.

His Presidency is an existential threat to our democracy and to world order. His abuse of the powers of his office serve no public purpose, but only his self-aggrandizement. And too often it seems in service of the enemy.

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¹ “A Culpable Innocence,” pp 58-59.
² These rights include the right of a state to grant asylum, the right of an individual to seek asylum, and the right of an individual to be granted asylum. The latter right presumes due process before a magistrate.
³ “The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide settled on a definition of genocide as ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’” (as quoted by Samantha Powers in her book, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 57)