The Coming Train Wreck

Whenever extremists pursuing a radical ideology seize the reins of power, expect the worst. Will America become another failed state?

I had a friend who was a Navy surgeon who had served during the Vietnam War. He once told me how he did autopsies on young soldiers whose deaths were so fresh that steam emanated from their corpses upon being cut open. My friend related this in a dispassionate tone. On the one hand, as then a young man of science, it was to him a rare opportunity to enrich his knowledge of the human body often mere minutes after soldiers were killed in combat. On the other hand, my doctor friend was quick to add that each case broke his heart. The painful memories have never left him.

As an analyst of political events and as a student of history, I have applied the same approach to failed societies I’ve observed and studied during my service as a diplomat. I fear I may be doing the same on my own society in the coming years.

I was part of a small team sent out to Cambodia in the early ‘90s to set up a new U.S. embassy as well as to participate in the UN-sponsored peace process to bring an end to the decade-plus long civil war that wracked that impoverished country. Their civil war was preceded by a four year reign of terror of the radical, Maoist Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. A central goal of the KR was retribution and vengeance, and to eliminate “enemies of the people” and “reactionary elements” in their insane quest to establish a purely Marxist peasant society. Upon seizing power in 1975, they drove the entire urban population into the countryside almost overnight and set up slave camps where they starved and worked people to death. They also created killing fields and a processing center for executing masses of people in an assembly line fashion. In a mere four years, the KR managed to murder some two million of their fellow citizens (out of a population of 7 million). They specifically targeted professionals and anyone who was educated. Today, visitors entering the genocide museum at what was the killing center are greeted with a mound of skulls. Photos of the grim-faced victims, taken just before they were killed, line the walls.

The surviving population suffered from collective PTSD. In contrast with people in neighboring countries, Cambodians were sullen and unsmiling at that time. We found that many were in need of psychiatric care. Our first embassy local hire was a good-natured man who had been a driver for the U.S. military attaché at our old embassy. He survived the KR terror by pretending to be an illiterate peasant. His entire family, however, had been wiped out.

For a year, I sat across a negotiating table from the Khmer Rouge’s Heinrich Himmler, Son Sen, the man in charge of carrying out the genocide. He was coldly reptilian with a ghoulish smirk who wore fancy silk suits. Years later, he and 13 members of his family were murdered in an internecine struggle within the dying KR. Their killers repeatedly ran over the bodies with a truck for good measure.

I studied this failed state and broken society up close and personal for over two years (and two additional preceding years from Thailand). I tried to wrap my head around how something like this could happen, just as my predecessors did right after World War II when entering Nazi concentration camps. I wrote detailed reports and analyses for Washington. I read books on the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide written by scholars. While fascinated as an analyst with the trainwreck Cambodia became, my heart was broken many times and painful memories stay with me to this day.

Another failed state in which I served was Cuba. I similarly held a detached fascination with how a middle income nation with promise and talented people was captured by a charismatic, narcissistic strongman and driven into the ground. At the same time, the human cost was driven home to me in the many broken lives I encountered. There was the young Cuban coast guard seaman who attempted to escape but was caught, severely injuring his genitalia in the process, and blackballed from any useful employment. The poet who had been imprisoned for “counterrevolutionary activities” simply for writing poetry of which the regime disapproved. The young woman, also caught trying to escape the island and denied gainful employment, who told me with steely determination that she would continue to try to flee until she either succeeded or drowned.

What these experiences confirmed with me is this: whenever extremists pursuing a radical ideology seize the reins of power, expect the worst.

Donald Trump, who ran on a promise to wreak “retribution,” told reporters this week that “there is no price tag” on deporting some 11 million undocumented aliens in this country, which economists estimate would cost around $88 billion per year. Trump aide Steve Bannon said on his podcast, “Now that the election is over, I think we can finally say that, yeah, actually, Project 2025 is the agenda.” He went on to predict the arrest and imprisonment of Special Counsel Jack Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

This is why I fear for the fate of the American people once Donald Trump and his MAGA shock troops return to Washington. His re-election shows us that he has succeeded in getting half of the American people to believe in his absurdities. What is to stop them from now carrying out atrocities on his behalf?

The analyst in me watches these developments with detached fascination. And with the same fascination will I dissect the fresh steaming corpse of this once great nation should it also become a failed state. But I will do so with a broken heart.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.