Violence at home, violence abroad. Let’s stop pretending: This is the American way

In the immediate aftermath of yet another assassination attempt this week, presidential hopeful Kamala Harris posted on X that “Violence has no place in America”. Her running mate, Tim Walz, posted much the same: “Violence has no place in our country. It’s not who we are as a nation.”

This is surely one of the biggest and most enduring lies that Americans tell themselves. Violence is embedded in American political history; it is foundational to the nation. It occupies a central place in the United States’ past and present, and it will continue to shape its future.

Donald Trump was the subject of a second assassination attempt on Sunday local time.Credit: AP

And it goes all the way down.

There are the top-level assassinations and attempted assassinations that litter American history – sometimes devastatingly successful and era-defining, sometimes minor blips on the campaign trail. On the ground, there is the endemic, racist violence that is a daily feature of American life and is currently rearing its ugly head in the small town of Springfield, Ohio. And there is the all too common, and apparently entirely acceptable, gun violence inflicted on children in classrooms.

This appalling, ongoing violence is not a bug. It is a feature.

In the US, the response to individual acts of violence like the assassination attempts on Donald Trump we have seen this week and in July tends to ignore or overlook why and how this continues to happen, and how to genuinely address it.

This is somewhat understandable given that, at present, a locked-up congress and lack of real political will means that the American political system is unable to do that, and actual gun reform seems politically impossible.

And so, in the absence of real change, the common consensus prevails: More guards and more guns, to fend off would-be assassins with access to the same weapons.

In the United States, the answer is always more guns.

In Australia, we know that taking peoples’ guns away is actually a pretty good idea. But the mistake we make is thinking what the US is dealing with (or not) is an entirely domestic problem that doesn’t impact us. The lie we tell ourselves here is that the violence that goes all the way down doesn’t also go all the way out.

But the violence that plagues the US isn’t, in fact, just a domestic issue. There is a reason the prime minister and foreign minister were asked about the political violence in America this week. A nation’s foreign policies are ultimately an extension of its domestic policies.For that reason, America’s domestic political violence matters to us, too.

There are the obvious effects: That violent, political chaos in the most powerful nation threatens democracy as a whole, and inevitably bleeds outwards.

The less obvious, and ongoing, effect, is that systemic national violence, and responses to it, are also projected outwards. In American foreign policy, just like in domestic policy, the instinctive response to every problem is not careful examination of the root causes before taking considered steps to addressing them in the long term. The instinctive answer is more violence.

Even as the Biden administration argues unconvincingly that it is making progress on a ceasefire agreement with Israel, its substantive answer is to continue sending more weapons. When it comes to Ukraine, the domestic political fight in America is not over how to broker a genuine peace, but over the continuation of military aid.

This is not to be naive about the complexities or realities of war. But when the instinctive answer is always more guns, diplomacy and real change inevitably become a secondary concern. In the all-too-frequent worst case, genuine peace-building is catastrophically and continually undermined by the facilitation of more violence by the United States.

Because when all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. And in Australia, that gives us disasters like the AUKUS submarine deal – a deal that increases, rather than reduces, tensions in the region. It’s a deal that assumes threats of violence are constant and can only be “deterred” with more threats of violence – much as American political analysis assumes would-be assassins can only be deterred by a few more guns in the hands of Secret Service agents. None of that addresses the underlying causes of violence, or understands that a country – and, indeed a world – awash with weapons will not be made safer by more of them.

The instinct to reach for more and bigger guns doesn’t make the US – or the world – any safer. As we have seen far too often, to the point of it almost becoming normalised and desensitising, it does precisely the opposite.

Political violence in America matters a great deal to us. And how we respond to it matters, too.

Dr Emma Shortis is a senior researcher in the International and Security Affairs Program at The Australia Institute.

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