The stark confrontations now convulsing downtown Portland, Oregon, might seem like the stuff of dystopian fiction, with unmarked federal shock troops descending on demonstrators with riot gear, gassing cordons of mothers and elected officials, and spiriting pedestrians away in unmarked rental vans. But as New Republic contributor Stuart Schrader notes, what looks on American cable broadcasts like a Philip K. Dick teleplay is something all too vividly real to scores of foreign nations targeted by the American counterinsurgency state in the Cold War and beyond.
 
U.S.-backed counterinsurgency operations have generally followed a glum trajectory of crackdowns, backlashes, and state impunity in the countries earmarked for campaigns of state violence seeking to tamp down popular insurgencies. As Schrader observes, it’s a basic playbook of military escalation at the expense of public safety. The playbook goes roughly as follows:

Insurgents succeed when they convince regular people to support them. Therefore, preventing them from gaining adherents among the population is paramount.

In the process, regular people end up becoming the state’s targets. If you support the insurgents, you’re a target. If you seem inclined to support the insurgents, you’re a target. The only way to avoid becoming a target is to offer fulsome support for the ruling regime and its forces. But, as classical counterinsurgency theory admits, supporting the regime can make you a target of the insurgents. Ergo, insurgents’ terror is met with governments’ counterterror.

The counterterror is always worse. After departing Guatemala in 1968, a State Department official named Viron P. Vaky, horrified by what occurred under his watch, sent his colleagues a pained memorandum titled “Guatemala and Counter-Terror.” How, he wondered, had it come to this? Was it because liberals (like himself) were too credulous of the revolutionary threat posed by the far left that they gave license to the far right and unleashed the police? Whatever the cause, the consequences were clear to Vaky. Guatemala’s counterterror was “corrosive,” “indiscriminate,” and “brutal.”

Transplanted to the streets of Portland, federal counterinsurgency forces are functioning much the same way that Guatemalan state and paramilitary operations did: meeting popular dissent with the blunt-force trauma of state-sanctioned violence. It’s no accident, as Schrader argues, that “the Border Patrol Tactical Unit that’s been operating with such impunity in Portland would normally be involved in the training of border agents in other countries.” U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is a prime recruiting ground for homegrown counterinsurgency campaigns, Schrader observes, since “under Trump, U.S. foreign policy has been shorn of any pretense of a commitment to liberal democracy. Now these reinvigorated ideologies are at work on the streets of the U.S.—even as protesters in the streets evidence some of our greatest popular democratic possibilities yet.”
 
But CBP is hardly acting alone. Portland has also witnessed the widespread deployment of homegrown shock troops of the Department of Homeland Security—the federal agency that harbors the child-caging rank and file of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and serves as a prime tributary of “Trumpism’s true believers” in the national security state. And now, with the president threatening similar federal sweeps through cities like Chicago, Albuquerque, and New York, it’s especially urgent to defenders of our rapidly fraying formal democracy to heed the sobering historical lessons of America’s past misadventures in counterinsurgency, since, as Schrader writes, they’ve never represented a net gain for civic self-determination. And that marks a harder lesson still for small-d democrats on the American scene. “Trumpism is just the logical conclusion of something we’ve been loath to admit for decades,” Schrader writes. “The illiberalism of counterterror is the American creed.”

—Chris Lehmann, editor