During a recent press briefing, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the protests against police violence south of the border. Stumped, he paused for twenty-one seconds before responding, “We all watch in horror and consternation at what’s going on in the United States.”

But to those familiar with America’s foreign policy, horror and consternation are arguably not what came to mind when President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the wrath of the military on Americans demonstrating the death of George Floyd in police custody. For decades, under various administrations, the US government eroded civil liberties in foreign lands by supporting murderous dictators, overthrowing elected leaders and waging sordid wars. It’s no surprise, then, that the same viciousness is manifesting at home. Violence begets violence, after all.

While political pundits and netizens make much ado about the looting and vandalism occurring amid the protest against racism and police brutality, it bears mentioning that those acts register as unseemly because Americans are wrecking businesses on American soil. It also bears mentioning that looting and destruction are quintessentially part of America’s foreign policy towards black, brown and poor countries.

Amid the invasion of Iraq, American soldiers killed civilians, bombed cities and villages to oblivion, plundered artefacts, and destroyed archaeological sites in the name of liberation. They snatched Middle Eastern men off the streets and from their homes, then imprisoned them without trial in the dungeon that is Guantanamo Bay, where they’ve endured extrajudicial torture at the hands of American soldiers and doctors. Iraqi women and children weren’t spared either from American terrorism, with some raped and maimed for life.

The same deadly aggression extended to Afghanistan and Yemen, when US drone strikes transmogrified weddings into funerals. Meanwhile in Latin America, several countries still suffer the effects of CIA orchestrated coups that propped up despots and allowed guerrilla rebels run amok. The US’s unwillingness to connect these and other self-serving intrusions with the immigration crisis on its southern border and anti-American sentiment in the Arab world mirrors the denial surrounding police brutality and the legacy of slavery on black Americans today.

This is why it’s imperative for anti-racism protesters to draw parallels between the violence the US inflicts on people of colour elsewhere and racial discrimination in America. It’s vital that they link the racist ideology that created the prison industrial complex that enslaves blacks and Hispanics to their country’s oppressive foreign policy towards developing, non-white nations by way of unfair trade practices, economic sanctions and military incursions. Human rights violations committed by the US, home and abroad, must draw equal outrage and condemnation, and for Americans such a stance would require decoupling patriotism from the compulsion of taking up arms against state-manufactured enemies.       

It’s no secret Americans of all stripes view their military as the ultimate symbol of Americanness. So ingrained is this mentality that even perennially harassed minorities in the US see no irony in bombing, subjugating and killing non-white, non-Europeans at the behest of the white patriarchal government. Case in point, the legendary Buffalo Soldiers, an all-black regiment, battled Native Americans to ensure the safety of white settlers on the Western frontier.

Similarly, black men fought in the Vietnam War, a war Mohammed Ali vehemently opposed at the expense of his freedom and livelihood. For that, detractors billed him “unpatriotic” and a “disgrace to his country [and] race.” But Ali saw through the sham of equating support for military invasions to love of country. He understood the cruel hypocrisy of visiting on a people the same bestiality he and other black Americans suffered at the hands of a white-led, patriarchal government.

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some hungry people in the mud for big, powerful America,” Ali said upon refusing military induction. “They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They never put dogs on me. They never robbed me of my nationality, or raped and killed my mother and father.”

Indeed, history and current realities have demonstrated partaking in US military expeditions against non-Americans overseas is not a panacea for racism back home. And like the Buffalo Soldiers and black Vietnam War veterans of yesteryear, government policies still discriminate against black Americans, the wretched of the earth America flagrantly disdains except when they’re generating millions of dollars for majority white-owned sports teams and sports fashion brands, entertaining white eyes and ears, or swelling military forces.

America can be great without resorting to jingoism or militarism, something President Trump has shown an uncanny penchant for, having threatened to sic “vicious dogs” on anti-racism demonstrators outside the White House.

Reacting to the Trump administration’s intention to take over Washington DC’s police to disperse protesters, the city’s mayor Muriel Bowser told the New York Times, “I don’t think the military should be used in the streets of American cities against Americans.”

But if the US military isn’t a good idea for American cities and Americans, then why is it for others?

Like a nuclear fallout, violence invariably spreads beyond its intended target. To that end, calls to defund the police need to extend to the ballooning defence budget. For fiscal year 2020, it stood at roughly $700 billion—the largest of any country—a chunk of which will go into the manufacture of weapons of destruction that later emerge as drones, grenade launchers, and assault rifles for use abroad and locally as evinced by the militarisation of the police, an entity that has a fraught relationship with minority communities.

Due to the interconnectedness of foreign and domestic policies, Black Lives Matter and the tide of protesters demanding an end to racial injustice can’t afford to separate their realities from the terrors of the US offshore. Otherwise, the depravity meted out to the Global South will inevitably make its way home.

A version of this story originally appeared in The Independent.

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