The Stupidest Timeline

Commentator

I am well aware that recently I have been writing about politics less than I mean to. This isn’t great. If commentary has a purpose, it’s to meet moments like this one, with a war on and geopolitical dynamics changing maybe permanently.

But I find it very difficult to do. The issue is that we really are in the stupidest timeline and analysis is almost entirely defeated by it. I really shouldn’t be shocked by anything anymore but I was a bit shocked by Trump’s Easter proclamation — “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah” — which even for him may be a new low.

So what we have is a rogue superpower on our hands run by a child. It’s exactly the scenario that everybody imagined when Trump first ran for president, but we were lulled into a false sense of security by the relative restraint of the first term when he did display, in his own way, an interest in governance and contented himself with tax cuts as well as the occasional stretching of the itchy trigger finger as in the killing of Soleimani. But now it’s what we all pretty much thought it was going to be — American citizens murdered on city streets as part of an authoritarian flex; a path of random mayhem sown all over the globe.

Needless to say, there is no real rationale for the war, for the bombing of the girls’ school, for the impending oil shock. The idea of generating regime change, or even meaningful reform, through air power alone was always going to be a non-starter — and, of course, Trump is too disorganized to helm a ground invasion. With his capacity to divulge, he has at least spoken to some of the truth of what the war is about — it’s a force of “habit” to bomb in the Middle East; and the ‘back to the Stone Ages’ rhetoric must feel good as it’s being typed into the Truth Social chat bar.

And now we have a situation where the U.S. has gone rogue — and is rogue for the foreseeable future. All pretense of legitimacy in international actions is stripped away. The multilateral institutions are abandoned as fast as Trump is able to abandon them. The U.S.‘ erstwhile allies are tweaking, and working around, the U.S. in any they can. And there is no reason to expect that this state of affairs will change anytime soon. The U.S. (with Israel) appears to have such a relative advantage in weaponry that no one else can really compete, and so long as the stockpile holds out the U.S. can continue to swagger around the world without much repercussion. (A cynic would say that this has actually been the state of affairs for quite some time but with a veneer of international law.)

I was in the U.S. recently for the first time in a while and what was striking was how normal everything is. The TSA issue was clogging up the airports, but that was already being resolved while I was there. There wasn’t actually the same pervasive dread that there had been a year before — at that point, it seemed like Trump was on the verge of declaring a class war and everyone I knew in the professional-managerial class/intelligentsia who was connected to government funding in any way seemed at risk of losing their job. Trump seems to have lost interest in that, and so there are the immigration raids and then the foreign adventures. There’s no particular protest movement over the Iran war, and the reason for that is understandable — everybody seems to think Trump will spin it the way he can and then get bored and move on.

But I find that to be not very comforting. I don’t talk very much about leaving the U.S., and Trump isn’t the primary reason for that, but it’s definitely in the mix. I am pretty patriotic, actually. I do think there is something in the U.S. that represents a very special kind of aspiration. And returning to the U.S. from abroad, I am struck at all the things the U.S. does well — for all its problems, the level of development simply is higher than elsewhere except pockets of Western Europe and East Asia. And that means that it is a tragedy for me to see what has happened — to see the U.S. (although to be fair this is largely a one-man wrecking ball) uncouple from any norms of international legitimacy and from the system of alliances that represents a continuity to the World War II victory. Everybody always reaches for Roman allusions, and for once, that really seems to be the case here. We’ve ended up with a Caligula or a Nero. It’s maybe a survivable situation. Rome lasted for centuries after the advent of the mad emperors, but the damage was nonetheless incalculable. What Rome represented wasn’t just power but a vision of benevolent statecraft, of what civilization could be. We are that too, sometimes. But not now — and I have no idea when, or if, that will return.