A year after the vacation with my wife abroad, I sometimes revisit it quietly—before the house wakes up, before the world intrudes. Coffee cooling beside me, light just beginning to reach the corners of the room, memory does the rest.
Belgium comes back first: the hush of its farm roads, mist rising over pastures, cattle moving with unhurried patience. Villages stitched together by stone and steeple, bread warm from the oven, life paced by the rhythm rather than urgency. It felt like a country content to breathe—quietly reminding me that simplicity can be its own kind of wealth.
Then Texas.
Suburban streets measured and calm, trees easing into fall, American life going about its business with reassuring ordinariness. From afar, America often feels most itself in these small, unguarded moments—before slogans, before headlines, before the machinery begins to hum.
I remember thinking then that the country felt tired, but still familiar. Divided, yes—but functioning. Like a family that no longer agrees at the dinner table yet still shows up to eat.
When The Headlines Arrive
Out of habit, I opened my laptop.
And just like that, the mood changed.
“Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise”
“U.S. Invasion of Venezuela: Power and Profit”
“U.S. Strikes in Venezuela Trigger Regional and Global Alarm”
The quiet morning evaporated.
This no longer felt like a reflection. It felt like a screenplay I had seen before.
Right on cue, “Wag the Dog” returned—America’s most honest documentary disguised as fiction. Robert De Niro, unbothered. Dustin Hoffman, inspired. A presidency under pressure. A public in need of diversion.
“We need a war.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the oldest trick in the book.”
Mark Twain once warned that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. In Washington, it doesn’t even bother rhyming. It just releases a remastered version.
A Familiar Script, A Different Stage
In the film, they chose Albania. Why Albania? Because nobody knew anything about it.
Today, Venezuela steps into the role. Greenland waits patiently in casting—same mystery, same “why not?” energy, plus a certain because-we-can audacity. Geography becomes prop. Strategy turns into set design. Patriotism gets mood lighting.
As George Orwell observed, political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Add a flag, and suddenly the soundtrack swells.
But here’s the trouble with reruns: the audience remembers the ending.
Vietnam: When Might Failed To Persuade
Vietnam was meant to demonstrate power. The United States possessed overwhelming military superiority—advanced air power, massive troop deployments, unmatched resources. On the battlefield, it won many tactical engagements. Cities were taken, enemy casualties were high. Militarily, it was rarely defeated in conventional sense.
And yet, it lost the moral and political war.
Globally, the war came to symbolize imperial overreach. Images of napalm, civilian casualties, and My Lai shattered America’s moral narrative. Domestically, public support collapsed. Internationally, legitimacy eroded. In the end, the U.S. withdrew, and Vietnam was unified under the very force it sought to stop.
Vietnam remains the textbook lesson: overwhelming might can win battles, but without moral credibility and political legitimacy, it cannot secure victory. Might is impressive—but it is not persuasive.
History, unlike press briefings, keeps receipts.
Foreign adventures are often sold as national unifiers. In practice, they tend to unite everyone else—neighbors, regions, even allies—against the adventurer.
Closer To Home: The Same Playbook At Sea
This script feels uncomfortably familiar closer to home.
Here in the Philippines, we have watched the same drama unfold in maritime form. When domestic pressures rise, the Dragon’s “historical claim” conveniently surfaces. Swarms of maritime militia vessels appear, employing water cannons and dangerous maneuvers. Maps grow creative. National pride is summoned on cue. The West Philippine Sea becomes a stage, complete with uniforms and talking points.
Different superpower. Same playbook.
Dwight Eisenhower once cautioned Americans to beware the military-industrial complex. He did not offer it as satire, but as warning. Somewhere along the way, the warning became a business model.
Empires do not stumble because they lack strength. They stumble because they confuse spectacle with unity, noise with consent, and distraction with legitimacy.
As Hannah Arendt noted, the ideal subject of total power is not the convinced believer, but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.
A Domestic Mirror Of Division
That distinction grows blurrier this week.
As foreign-policy theatrics dominated screens, another headline ignited nationwide outrage: the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American, during an immigration enforcement operation. Protests erupted across cities. Officials issued competing narrative. Trust eroded in real time.
Here lay the stark microcosm of “Divided America”: the clash between a citizen’s life and the machinery of state power; justice contested by authority; outrage answered by procedure. If America’s divisions were cracks in a façade, this moment made them visible—uncomfortably, unmistakably.
What Does Not Test Well
I closed my laptop. The coffee had gone cold. Outside, morning light continued doing what it always does—indifferent to spin doctors, unmoved by strategy memos.
America does not need a war.
Neither does anyone else.
What divided nations need is quieter and far less cinematic: repair, restraint, and the courage to face their own domestic mess without changing the channel to divert the homecourt viewers.
Unfortunately, as any producer will tell you, that doesn’t test well with audiences.
Content & editing put together in collaboration with ChatGPT
Head Image courtesy of ChatGPT image creator
Still photos from travel album, movies anywhere, Freepik, Indo-Pacific Defense, Richmond Free Press
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