On Tuesday, Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress. President Donald Trump will serve his final two years as a lame duck. Pundits often argue that lame duck presidents turn from frustration at home to adventurism abroad. If they are right, the next two years will be turbulent ones for the United States.
Democrats have impeached Trump twice before, and they seem likely to do so again. They will resist his domestic policy agenda. But a President besieged at home still sits at the table with other heads of state. He still commands the American military abroad. Foreign policy may offer an arena in which he has room to move.
Though Trump campaigned to end foreign wars, he has not been gun-shy. Our country faces the prospect of world war on at least three fronts.
- First, in Ukraine, where the United States and Russia are still engaged in a proxy war that began in 2014.
- Second, in the South China Sea, where China claims the right to control Taiwan. Taiwan’s self-defense depends on weapons bought from the United States.
- Third, in the Middle East, where a shaky pause in the Iran War offers a brief reprieve in a conflict that has flared since in February.
All this talk of geopolitics may seem remote to people living on a mid-Pacific archipelago. But despite its apparent isolation, Hawaiʻi is central to the conflicts between great powers.
Military lease terms depend on the needs of American empire in the Indo-Pacific. “Force posture realignments” mean billions of dollars and thousands of defense personnel coming to or leaving our state. Protests over proposed telescopes make for great spectacle, while Hawaiʻi’s key role in the great power race to control outer space is invisible to the naked eye.
A certain naivete precedes periods of great conflict. On the eve of World War I, European intellectuals looked forward to global peace. A similar irenic mood followed the “Great War,” before its deadlier sequel. British appeasement of Germany in the 1930s presupposed that peace was possible despite the territorial ambitions of the Nazi regime. And, of course, few people believed that Imperial Japan would bomb Pearl Harbor until the USS Arizona was underwater.
Since the Cold War began, folks in Hawaiʻi have sensed that we’re under the gun. Nuclear submarines docked in Pearl Harbor have their missiles trained on other great powers, and those great powers have their missiles aimed back — at us.
Nuclear annihilation is a quaint fear. Today, AI swarms are sent every day like kamikaze bombers. They burrow into computer systems, ready to cripple hospitals or to shut off the power or water supply. Bots are tilting social media algorithms to sow discord and foment unrest. Total warfare now reaches into the mind.
In Ukraine, drones swarm in the sky, leaving fiber optic cables strewn in their wake. The filaments are thin, nearly invisible — much like the relationship of Hawaiʻi to the grand strategies of rival empires.
Hawaiʻi was left off the map of the classic board game, Risk. But such global conflicts cannot help but consume us.
We are left to pray for our leaders, from the president and those who sit in Congress to our legislators and council members closer to home. We pray for their wisdom, and that they may receive and heed wise counsel.
May God keep our nation from war and protect our state from conflicts which threaten to engulf it.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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