The American War Movie Trump Wants to Make
On the lasting impact of Vietnam War movies, and also Trump’s foreign policy.
It didn’t necessarily surprise me to see that much of the coverage in the U.S. of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon—April 30, 1975—has focused on the cultural impact of the Vietnam War. Of course, there are plenty of other important angles from which to reflect on the anniversary, and rest assured, many phenomenal thinkers are doing just that. But within the United States, it is fair to say that by far the biggest effect still felt today of the war is cultural, both on a broad societal level and in pop culture.
It’s an effect I felt acutely as I watched Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in recent weeks. Those and other films about the Vietnam War fundamentally and permanently altered how Hollywood depicts war—and, more specifically, American wars.
In fact, I would go so far as to make a sweeping generalization: There are only two types of American war movies, defined by how they depict the U.S. role in the world.
On one hand, there is the World War II movie, most popular in the immediate postwar period. These depict the United States and its military with a kind of mythic heroism, not only because the cause of the protagonists is self-evidently righteous but because that cause requires personal and societal sacrifices. At their root is American exceptionalism and, as film historian Thomas Doherty described it, a “serenity of moral certainty.”
On the other hand, there are Vietnam War movies, a group that also includes movies about virtually every American conflict since Vietnam. These movies depict U.S. interventionism as, at best, not worth the sacrifice and, at worst, doing more harm than good. They often focus on the traumatic effects of war—more often on the soldiers but occasionally local civilians—and question the authorities that tried to justify the conflict.
Of course, both depictions were and are reflections of popular viewpoints of the wars themselves. But they also promoted and, more importantly, preserved those viewpoints. Much like the effect of the imagery from war movies, these films came to define the legacy of these conflicts, and whether or not they were justified, in the public imagination.
As historian Marilyn B. Young put it back in 2004:
[T]he war movies of the 1980s mark an unraveling of the American war story. They do not end in total victory; the cause for which the troops fight is obscure and probably unworthy; and honor and courage can be salvaged but only by abandoning patriotic rhetoric. In the aftermath of U.S. victory in the Gulf war, President George H. W. Bush was optimistic that the country had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome.’ But the syndrome continued to manifest itself in the popular imagination of war.
Since wars are the primary lens through which Americans think about foreign policy, these movies have also played an outsize role in shaping Americans’ views on what the U.S. role in the world should be. Put another way, if there are two distinct types of American war movies, then there are also two ways people in the U.S. view the very idea of America.
(I already admitted that the generalization is sweeping. Follow me here.)
Given the lasting impact of movies about the Vietnam War on filmmaking, it may seem like the viewpoints those films depict have won out as well. And yet, it’s more accurate to say that both viewpoints have prevailed, sometimes dominating in certain groups but more often co-existing in popular culture and the political zeitgeist.
Perhaps the most illustrative example of this is Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a WWII movie that is simultaneously brutal in its depiction of conflict and sentimental about the war’s righteous cause. Even the Marvel movies of the 2000s and 2010s, not known for thematic complexity, wrestled with the duality of American heroism and American overreach.
To varying degrees, every U.S. president since the 1980s has also attempted to hold both viewpoints. And yet, the loudest distillation of this duality may actually have been the original iteration of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” messaging.
As with all things Trump, there was and is a massive gap between his statements and his actions, but from a messaging perspective—presumably the thing voters originally responded to—the rhetoric he eschewed while campaigning ahead of the 2016 election often argued for the U.S. to simultaneously play a savior role and focus inward. In Trump’s first speech on his foreign policy ethos in 2016, he said, “America will continue and continue forever to play the role of peacemaker. We will always help save lives and indeed humanity itself,” just minutes after arguing repeatedly against interventions abroad.
These two arguments may seem incongruous, but even so, they in many ways reflect the prevailing view among Americans. The clearest example of this is the war in Ukraine, a conflict that has the “serenity or moral certainty” seen in WWII movies. Since Russia’s all-out invasion, a solid majority of Americans have continuously supported aid for Ukraine, but support for direct U.S. military involvement is much lower.
Notably, though, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has shifted greatly, especially since winning reelection last year. Here’s Nicholas Bequelin for Foreign Policy on just the first two months of Trump’s second term:
Trump has fractured the United States’ relationship with Europe, called into question Washington’s commitment to NATO, blamed Ukraine for Russia’s aggression, frozen military aid to Kyiv, withdrawn from key United Nations institutions, initiated a global tariff war, interrupted the global delivery of American aid and humanitarian assistance, and signaled that the United States could break the central tenet of the postwar global order—the prohibition against territorial expansion at the expense of other sovereign entities—by threatening to take control of Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza.
And here’s my esteemed editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, on Trump’s view of military force:
Trump rejects the logic that Obama as well as other U.S. presidents and foreign policy analysts use to assess whether a war is smart or dumb—namely, the logic of the global order that the U.S. custom-built for its own benefit in the aftermath of World War II and consolidated following the Cold War. … Whether it is to defend the global order’s norms of territorial integrity and sovereignty, as in Kuwait and Ukraine, or advance U.S. interests as defined by its global role, as in NATO, Japan and South Korea, Trump sees any military action or security commitment undertaken to uphold the liberal international order as being “played for a sucker.”
Meanwhile, Trump also rejects the laws, norms and values that Obama as well as other U.S. presidents, foreign policy analysts and international jurists would use to judge whether a war is just or not. During his first term, Trump said the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil, and he is now fixated on imperial annexation. As importantly, the cases during his first term in which Trump embraced the use of force, it was in situations where it “broke the rules” …
Put simply, Trump’s foreign policy and military rhetoric no longer argues for the U.S. to take a step back from the world stage, but rather for the U.S. to actively bully the rest of the world with its military and economic might. This shift is alarming in its own right, in particular Trump’s now-consistent calls for American territorial expansion, even if it could be argued that it is the logical evolution of Trump’s far-right nationalism.
What I find especially striking, though, is how completely detached this viewpoint is from the depiction of the U.S. role in the world in popular culture for much of the past century. In other words, there is no third kind of American war movie glorifying U.S. conquest. There are pro-military movies—your Top Guns, Black Hawk Downs, and lesser works—but even these function within the WWII movie viewpoint. The U.S. fills that savior role, however un-nuanced or historically inaccurate it may be in each case.
The result is that, today, the idea of the U.S. flexing its hegemonic powers for explicitly imperialist ambitions seems downright alien, simply because it is not an idea that Americans have seriously encountered in nearly a century, despite living in the world’s superpower.
Indeed, Trump’s hegemonic ambitions are so alien that they seem unbelievable, at first interaction even comical. When it was reported during Trump’s first term that he had suggested buying Greenland, the idea was essentially laughed into abandonment.
No one was laughing over the weekend as Trump explicitly said he wouldn’t rule out using military force to take Greenland. But the pervasive gut reaction is still one of disregard, in large part because there are more urgent issues to address. And yet, it is increasingly clear that Trump wants to make a third kind of American war movie. At the very least, Americans should start confronting that idea before it appears onscreen.
That’s all for this edition of Cansler Culture. If you liked what you read and you haven’t already subscribed, here’s a convenient button to do so.
As always a very in-depth piece. It is such a fluid concept in the Trump administration so it it tough to nail down