Trump Closes Refugee Doors, Media Forgets Who Kicked Them Open
The story details how Trump's 2025 policies leave thousands of refugees stranded worldwide. A compelling narrative, to be sure, yet missing from this lament is the consistent US foreign policy—across administrations, not just Trump's—that helped create these very refugee crises. Think Yemen, courtesy of US-backed Saudi bombardments (Biden just approved another $18B in F-15s to Israel in May 2024,
despite congressional objections); think Iraq, Libya, Syria, all destabilized by Western interventionism. General Wesley Clark, in 2007, publicly attested to a Pentagon plan to 'take out' seven countries in five years post-9/11. The Independent's concern for refugees feels a bit like mourning a flood while ignoring the broken dam. One might wonder if the media's memory is simply finite, or if
acknowledging the imperial roots of mass displacement might complicate the easy villain narrative. Are these 'new policies' truly new, or just a more explicit iteration of a long-standing, bipartisan American indifference to the human cost of its global strategy? Perhaps, if we stopped creating so many refugees, we wouldn't need to debate so fiercely whether to admit them.