A President, or even a political leader, bad-mouthing another political leader, as Trump has done Zelensky, is not new…writes Mihir Bose
If there is one thing Trump is regularly described as it is that he is a disrupter. Boris Johnson used that term after Trump spewed a load of so-called facts about Zelensky and Ukraine, which are manifestly false. This characterisation of Trump could not be further from the truth. Yes, what Trump says often causes not so much a storm as a tsunami as his utterances on Ukraine are doing. But that is not because he wants to disrupt politics. It is because, having got prominence as a television celebrity on The Apprentice, where he loved saying You are Fired, he craves attention and cannot exist without leading the news.
A President, or even a political leader, bad-mouthing another political leader, as Trump has done Zelensky, is not new. What is new is that Trump is doing it publicly. His predecessors as President were even more scathing about leaders of other countries, but they did it privately, and these views only emerged many years later. What is more, they did not want such views to be known. Trump wants the world to know.
Richard Nixon and the Bangladesh War provide a classic example. This saw Pakistan carry out a butchery of its people living in what was then East Pakistan. This little-remembered genocide of 1971 was almost as bad as the later atrocity in Rwanda, and the facts, although still denied by Pakistan, are etched in the memory of every Bangladeshi. The Pakistani army, mainly from West Pakistan, butchered an estimated million Bangladeshis, with ten million refugees fleeing to India, thousands of women raped, and a ferocious ethnic cleansing of the minority Hindu population. The US consul-general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, in a famous and graphic telegram to the State Department, called it “Selective Genocide.”
The Pakistani genocide came just as Nixon was in the middle of negotiating his historic opening to Mao’s China and using Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator who had ordered the genocide to stop east Pakistan from seceding, as his “postman” to deliver messages to the Chinese and arrange a visit to Beijing. At that stage, 22 years after the formation of the People’s Republic of China, America still did not recognise China and pretended that Taiwan represented the mainland. It had even prevented China from taking its permanent seat in the Security Council. Blood sent chilling reports documenting the genocide, but Nixon readily accepted Yahya’s assurance that there was no genocide and that it was all just an Indian plot to destroy Pakistan. He dismissed Blood as another wretched liberal. Observe how this is similar to Putin dismissing Russian atrocities in Ukraine as a fiction invented by the Ukrainians.
Nixon had always hated India and loved Pakistan and had called Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, “arrogant, abrasive and suffocatingly self-righteous.” “Pakistan is a country I would like to do everything for. The Pakistanis are completely frank, even when it hurts.”
Indians, Nixon told his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were “devious, a slippery, treacherous people”, unlike the “straightforward Pakistanis”. “The British”, he informed the British Foreign Secretary, “got out too soon.” Just as he had hated Nehru, so he loathed Indira Gandhi, calling her “the old bitch”, while Yahya was a “thoroughly decent and reasonable man” Kissinger, for whom Indians were “those sons of bitches”, admired Yahya’s Sandhurst training and likened him to Abraham Lincoln. For the Pakistani Lincoln, Nixon broke his own government’s embargo on arms sales, supplying weapons through Jordan and Iran. Kissinger even shared secret US intelligence with the Chinese, hoping China would mass troops on its Indian border and force the Indians to abandon their plans to stop the slaughter by invading East Pakistan.
But how do we know all this? Neither Nixon nor Kissinger held a press conference to make such views known. These were secret conversations, and we know them because Nixon recorded them. The tapes relating to Watergate are well known. The tapes relating to Bangladesh remained hidden for years and only emerged in 2013 thanks to the academic Gary Bass, whose book The Blood Telegram Nixon, Kissinger And A Forgotten Genocide is a classic. Displaying great forensic skill, Bass analysed these secret White House tapes to back his allegation that Nixon and Kissinger covered up their responsibility for the slaughter in East Pakistan, a cover-up with consequences infinitely more lethal than Watergate. Even now, some of the material remains secret.
Trump is making similar allegations about Zelensky and Ukraine, but they are not concealed in tapes but broadcast on the news.
Where Trump is similar to Nixon is that he uses an attack dog. Like Nixon, who used Spiro Agnew, his vice President, Trump uses J.D. Vance, his Vice- President. But here again, there is a difference. Agnew attacked the American liberal media. The word fake news, which has been made popular by Trump, had not yet emerged, but that was the substance of Agnew’s charges. However, his campaign was against what Nixon saw as domestic enemies. Vance, in contrast, as he did in Munich, is attacking foreign countries, in this case European countries, claiming they are stopping free speech and betraying their democratic heritage. Leaders do not normally publicly attack foreign countries unless they are at war with them as Putin has been doing with Ukraine. For Vance to launch attacks on countries that are allies of America is astonishing indeed and another Trump innovation.
But then this is how Trump operates. He has an attack dog which allow him to behave like a ferocious jungle beast seeking to devour everyone in his path.
It is interesting to look back to what happened to Nixon and Agnew. Agnew pleaded guilty to tax felony and had to resign. Nixon, as a result of the Watergate revelations, had to leave office.
Trump, having survived so many legal charges against him, is sack proof. But if he were to go Vance succeeding him could well be worse.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie, Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British.
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