“Can I go to the bathroom?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
Most of us learned the hard way where to use which modal verb so that we give the correct information about the main verb. We would not always be ridiculed in front of the class! But it was not easy, not only for ESL students but also for natives.
Perhaps U.S. President Donald Trump could put an end to the plan that has been seeking to create a Greater Israel and a Kurdish entity between it and Türkiye and Iran. The NeoCons and Globalists, as Trump said last week, “blew up the Middle East” with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during the second Bush administration. That plan has been in effect since then – throughout the Trump Act I and Biden years.
But – this is a very big “but” – may he end it?
If he could, why didn’t he do it when the dismemberment in Syria was not as immutable as it looks today? His own secretary of defense, James Mattis, and his own Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, quit over Trump’s Syria pullout. Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dared them to allow Turkish armed forces to eradicate what they termed the Daesh threat. The NeoCons and their point-man in the Trump Administration, John Bolton, asserted that only their “boots on the ground,” the PKK/YPG, could fight the extremist terrorists. Trump pathetically had to yield to them; he had to make lame excuses for not pulling U.S. troops from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
He could have! But he was not allowed to do it!
Now, Trump makes broad-stroke statements about where he wants to take the country. Listen to him, read the flurry of executive orders he signs with his egotistical signature and you begin feeling as though the world is about to change! Perhaps he desires so. But may he?
First of all, changing the world takes more than just intention and spirit; you must have a plan! The plan doesn’t mean populistic creaks. So far, the only strategy he has put forward is called “a madman strategy!” The secret behind Trump’s foreign policy is not well-thought analyses to reshape the world order. Why should the U.S. invade (or purchase) Greenland? Were there military discussions and long-term technical audits by experts that clearly display the nationalistic, metallurgic or strategic importance of the Atlantic puffins and gold mines for the U.S.?
In short, Trump’s threat of annexing the Panama Canal and Greenland is only a populist outburst like his other recent remarks. If they were a message to other major powers, as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni thinks, no one would shake in his boots in Russia or China. Trump certainly knows how to grab attention and please crowds, so he starts Act II with a bull-in-china-shop show. The U.S. media, which are not famous for their in-depth analyses, jumped the gun to create a flurry of vacuous debates. Suppose Trump, the Republican Party or the old-or-neo conservatives have a plan for a geopolitical reordering of the world. In that case, its opening salvo should not be in Trump’s feeble narratives. The U.S. is about to realize the largest territorial acquisition in modern history, and it is being announced in a few doddering sidesteps. No one buys it!
Nevertheless, this “madman strategy” works for those people who voted for him the second time around. The MAGA crowd has some expectations from this unpredictable man and he pleases them by seeming to be a man capable of doing the unthinkable.
My question is: Will those deep structures in the burrows under Washington, D.C., allow him to do it? You know, the appropriate modal verb usage!
Trump declared a “national energy emergency;” experts think it’s a “farce” because the U.S. is pumping record levels of oil. Trump says he’ll tap into the country’s vast oil and gas reserves while the country needs no more oil and gas and neither the EU will buy more energy from the U.S. Besides, both the U.S. and European climate scientists say burning more fossil fuels will overheat the planet. But no! Trump signed executive orders to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Climate Deal. Trump is simply bootlicking the fossil fuel executives to boost their bottom lines. (Remember, the big oil companies oiled Trump’s palms to the order of half a billion dollars in his election campaign.)
Trump can only fire voluntary workers of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition who, like the chef and former CEO of his restaurant group Jose Andres, already resigned a week ago. Trump still had to fire him because he imagines he is still in his populistic TV show “You’re fired!”
He pardons Capitol rioters for not restoring law and order, thus only saving his own tail, but he cannot repeal birthright citizenship by executive order. It has already been slammed on his face by the courts. However, one wonders what happened to those grown-ups at the GOP.
We know Joseph Votel, a retired general in the U.S. Army who was commander of Central Command, from his support of the July 15, 2016 coup attempt in Türkiye. Though he rejected the fact that he had supported a failed coup attempt, we remember how he wept after the coup plotters when the Turkish government rounded them up. The same Votel has already shown the teeth on behalf of those who put that nick on Trump’s right ear. Votel said Trump seems to be convinced that it is possible to secure American interests without troops in Syria, as he appeared to be during his last term as president. But Votel added that the U.S. forces could leave Syria only after limiting any Turkish or Turkish-backed “incursion” into the PKK/YPG-held areas where Daesh fighters are being held.
That, Mr. President, is how to ask permission to go to the bathroom. You should use the modal verb “may,” as in “May I end your century-old plan for Greater Israel and dismembering Iraq, Syria and Türkiye?” And do not forget to add “Please…”