Trump WILL exploit American deaths – and the sacrifice trap explains why

All six crewmembers of the US military tanker which crashed on 12 March 2026 are dead, after Trump carried out an unprovoked attack on Iran and brought severe unrest to the region. That brings the overall US death toll thirteen – officially, at least. The cause of the crash is unclear, as the Canary reported here.

Needless to say the number of innocent civilians killed across the region are still being counted and are unlikely to have anything like the same sort of news value in the Western legacy media.

For me, the crash summons an acute memory. Twenty years ago, I personally delivered the coffins meant for 14 dead airmen across Kandahar Airfield in Southern Afghanistan to the base’s medical centre where their remains were held.

Their Nimrod spy plane had crashed days earlier. Some reports blamed a fuel leak on the ageing aircraft.

Then as now, the airmen concerned died in a war of choice they were sent to because of the remote, hubristic ambitions of politicians thousand of miles away. Then as now, such deaths were useful to the political class at home.

Trump will fall for the sacrifice trap

One way of understanding how the deaths of these crew members will be received is to look at the ‘sacrifice trap’. I first heard the term in a 2018 report authored by scholar and anti-militarist writer professor Paul Dixon. He describes the trap as one of:

a range of rhetorical devices are identified to justify war.

This device was regularly used back then to head off public opposition to the failing Afghanistan war.

Here’s Dixon:

The Sacrifice Trap – refers to the situation in which the deaths of military personnel creates a
reason to prolong war in order to justify these sacrifices. As more die this creates further
reasons to justify their deaths by defeating the enemy.

You can almost hear a Trump or a Blair saying it now. ‘If we stop fighting, the previous deaths will have been for nothing’.

In this way, the last death becomes the justification for the next one.

Dixon again:

There is an incentive to put military personnel in harm’s way so that their sacrifice leads to the justification of war. The state escalates or continues to fight in order to justify prior sacrifices.

I haven’t heard this rhetorical device employed fully yet. The US leadership doesn’t seem to care much about public opposition… But in my opinion it is only a matter of time as the death toll mounts. And what I do know for sure is that Trump – whose rise to power is so deeply entangled with the War on Terror – won’t hesitate to wield its devices, narratives, and vocabulary for his own ends.

Featured image via the Canary