Critical conditions

This morning, the global authority on food crises formally announced that part of the Gaza Strip is gripped by an “entirely man-made” famine. Though the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, has been warning of a severe and worsening food crisis in Gaza ever since Israel began its siege of the Palestinian territory, this is the first time an official famine designation has been applied. In fact, it’s the first time the IPC has ever formally identified a famine outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. It also comes as Israel prepares to mount a final, devastating assault on what is left of Gaza City — an assault that next to no one is alive to cover, thanks to Israel’s merciless elimination of journalists.

Meanwhile, here in the USA, our president is ratcheting up his federal takeover of the nation’s capital, with hundreds more National Guardsmen set to be flown in from red states — a takeover that his newly appointed ex-reality-star U.S. attorney has said could, in her estimation, last forever. There are a lot of connections between these crises, both logistically and philosophically. While their expressions and lethality are different, the underlying logic is the same: Whether it’s starving civilians or deploying troops against their own citizens, the U.S. and Israel are each using force against “internal outsiders” who their authoritarian leaders see as both convenient foils and potential threats to their power.

To understand what’s happening in Washington, my friend Jamelle Bouie wrote In the Times that the deployment of the National Guard and often masked and unidentified Kevlar-armored federal agents to Washington is “not for safety but for show.” “You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext,” he said. “You won’t find the National Guard in any of the city’s high-crime areas. A vast majority of soldiers and agents deployed to Washington are stationed in the vicinity of the White House and other high-profile sections of the city.” As in Los Angeles, it seems, they are there to do “nothing but give the White House additional footage to use for its social media accounts.”

Theatrical as it may be, this kind of deployment actually has a precise military designation. They’re called “presence patrols,” and were a constant tactic in recent U.S. occupations overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. As an Army field manual summarized, a “presence patrol” was at heart a normal information-gathering and combat operation with one key difference: “The primary difference is that the patrol wants to be seen both as a show of force and to lend confidence and stability to the local population of the host nation. As its name implies, this patrol is constituted to effect a presence.”

The reality on the ground often differs from the manual. An anonymous veteran gave the grunt’s-eye view on Reddit a few years ago. Staying at base, he wrote, “results in being surrounded by an enemy that has been given the time and land to build their numbers and fortify their fighting positions. I don't know about you man, but when I'm spraying for bugs, I hit the outside of my house. If my land is infested with rats, I'm not gonna sit in my home and be like ‘well, I'll just deal with them when they get inside.’ That's how you go from 0 rats to 100 rats overnight.”

I’ve written endlessly about the imperial boomerang, and here it is again. It’s just that in the American context, instead of being seen at the souk, it’s more effective for your show of force to be splashed all over the “hostiles’” TikTok and Instagram stories. The intended message is clear, to friend and foe alike: the regime is in control of the capital.

Yet this show of force carries real dangers. Putting armed soldiers on officially hostile streets is never without risks. Over and over again in the forever wars, “presence patrols” turned deadly, either because U.S. forces freaked out or because insurgents ambushed them. The DC Guard may be less inclined to see their fellow Washingtonians as the enemy — much less bugs or rats. But what about the new arrivals from Mississippi or West Virginia, raised on media diets that primed them to loathe and fear the denizens of “filthy and crime-ridden Democrat cities?” How long until one of the president’s partisans goes even more rogue, or an infuriated citizen tries to fight back with something harder than a sandwich?

It is unlikely that Trump has any next steps planned out for this deployment. (No more than he has thought through the consequences of egging on — and arming — Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza while simultaneously acknowledging that Netanyahu is lying when he denies the extent of the starvation there.)¹ But the people around him, especially Stephen Miller, have read their Carl Schmitt and the Nazi philosopher’s theorizing on “states of exception.” Much like Netanyahu, if given the slightest opportunity, provocation, or attack, they will know exactly what to do.

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