The Black Alliance for Peace sees the Trump administration’s announced withdrawal of US troops from Syria as “an attempt to realign itself with international law.” The US presence in Syria is “illegal,” said BAP lead organizer Ajamu Baraka. Trump should follow up the total withdrawal from Syria and partial pullback from Afghanistan with a dismantling of AFRICOM, the US Military Command in Africa.

We are witnessing “the beginning of the end of a world order that was hatched after World War Two,” said Duboisian scholar Dr. Anthony Monteiro. “What I see is a retreat from empire, based on a popular uprising of the people who have to pay the cost of empire” through austerity and war.

”American Niceness” can be deeply anti-social, according to the author of a book by the same name. “It can create boundaries and walls, ways to keep people at bay” rather than welcome them into the common polity, said Carrie Bramen, author and professor of English at Buffalo State University.