I live in Beirut in an area called the Corniche that runs along the edge of the American University of Beirut. The word, which comes from the French corniche, meaning “ledge,” refers to a road on a steep incline, usually along a coast or mountain face, that offers breathtaking views. Corniches are commonly associated with the French Riviera, where three famous routes—La Grande Corniche, La Moyenne Corniche, and La Basse Corniche—connect Nice to Monaco and Menton. In many Mediterranean regions, a corniche is any coastal road hugging cliffs or hillsides. Cairo’s “Corniche el-Nil” is a road that runs along the length of the Nile River—and in Lebanon, Beirut’s Corniche serves as a similar waterfront promenade. There, though, behind the glittering Mediterranean lies a bleaker picture: environmental degradation, moral decay, and political corruption. Wealth and deception, beauty and death seem to be intrinsically linked in these dramatic landscapes with blurred architectural and moral lines.
The Riviera has long exerted a strange hold on the American imagination. It functions as a fantasy of escape, a place where Old World charm meets modern hedonism. Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night; the expatriate life of Europe in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; Cannes and Nice, the region’s passages obligés, in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief: in these and countless other American tropes, the Riviera is envisioned as a world of excess, reinvention, and moral ambiguity all at once. So when President Donald Trump spoke earlier this week of turning Gaza—a place long described as an “open-air prison” and today a place of desolation and devastation—into the most beautiful “Riviera of the Middle East,” he was drawing on a deep reservoir of myths. It is a fantasy that not only brings full circle the original sin of the United States’ founding—built on the graves of indigenous Americans and later turning their lands into casinos—but also reflects the increasingly naked and brazen imperatives of today’s hyper-capitalism.
After all, this was a masterclass in how to sell a place of unimaginable destruction as paradise. And yet, there are two ways to achieve this outlandish goal: either through a war crime (his suggestion to expel 2.1 million people out of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan is the very definition of ethnic cleansing) or through taking the responsibility to rebuild what was destroyed by U.S. bombs so that the people of Gaza who have suffered unbearable misery and devastation can start to reconstruct their shattered lives and livelihoods. The latter scenario, of course, is not at all what Trump or Netanyahu have in mind. This would imperil their visions of this grotesque real estate project built on the corpses and ruins of expendable lives.
What is striking about Trump’s declaration is how it brings clarity to our current predicament. You can see the past unfolding in the present, and vice versa: the proposal is the paragon of how empires have behaved throughout history as well as how exploitative landlords dispose of the poor. Evict and redevelop. Exterminate and settle.
Not far from my apartment is the Riviera, a mythical hotel on Avenue de Paris along Beirut’s Corniche. It was built in 1956 during Lebanon’s golden era, when the country was known as the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” Like Switzerland, Lebanon became a hub of banking secrecy, tourism, and political neutrality—until the civil war erupted in 1975 over the question of neutrality vis-à-vis the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Since then, the Switzerland of the Middle East has become a wasteland—waste, in every sense of the word. Waste, as in the heaps of uncollected garbage, the byproduct of a broken, toxic, and dysfunctional system of governance. Waste, as in the squandered opportunities to build a democratic, progressive, inclusive, and pluralistic country. Waste, as in a nation wasting away, with an impoverished population reeling from an unprecedented economic, banking, and financial collapse—one sustained by a rapacious and corrupt ruling class. Waste, as in the Beirut port explosion, the ultimate paroxysm of impunity and moral erosion. Waste, as in an endless spilling of blood and destruction with no endgame in sight—the latest war with Israel has cost an estimated $8.5 billion according to the World Bank and has left a new generation of Lebanese traumatized and displaced. The list goes on.This is how “the Riviera” becomes a symbol of lost generations and decaying aspirations, a place where hubris and mercantile greed come together to embody the tragedy of a nation.
By stunning the world with his vision of a Gazan Riviera “cleansed” of its inhabitants, Trump did more than show an utter indifference to justice, history, and human dignity. He signaled something far more consequential—either alarming or reassuring, depending on one’s stand on geopolitics: the United States’ simultaneous retreat into isolationism at the hands of America First nationalists and expansion of ventures into exotic lands and strategic outposts. It is, in effect, the decline of Pax Americana: an era once envisioned as the global spread of democracy, stability, and peace.
In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Bret Stephens laments this decline as a loss of the image of a liberal, decent, and benevolent America—a country that projects itself as a force for good. He warns that Trump’s “America First” approach weakens U.S. credibility by placing its confidence in brute force rather than in alliances, trust, and moral leadership. In reality, the United States has never not been invading, interfering, intimidating both foes and allies, and expanding influence for self-serving interests. It was happy to invoke human rights discourse when convenient, but its real motive was always strategic and economic dominance. American sociologist George Ritzer once wrote of the “McDonaldization of society,” the process whereby the logic of consumerism became a totalizing form of social control. Now, it seems the “Rivierization of the world” will supplant it.
The evangelicals in the new administration might take heed of what the Bible says about this type of undertaking: “Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by injustice!”
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
