Opinion Sur
The new American administration faces the most significant shift in great-power relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since the administration represents a change in regime in the US, the geopolitical consequences will be momentous as well. They will be sold as an American revival, but may amount to a belligerent and fitful decline.
In January I took a break from American reality –or unreality—in Italy, and reflected on the present geo-political predicament from the splendid ruins of Paestum. Paestum was a city founded by Greek (Achaean) colonists. Its striking temples are still intact after more than 2500 years of natural disasters and social upheavals. When the Romans took over they dedicated one of these temples to Mens Bona, the Roman deity of reason, called upon to supervise the capacity for discernment of the political class. This was between the second and first centuries BC, when Rome was a republic run by an oligarchy that sought to be wise. Here are some notes.
Unwittingly perhaps, in the recent presidential election Americans triggered a coup d’état. A democratic coup d’état? The expression sounds absurd and yet I shall explain how on some level it makes sense. It is of course not a classic coup of the abrupt military sort that we read in practical manuals from Curzio Malaparte[1] to Edward Luttwak[2], and which I witnessed in Argentina much too often[3]. It is rather a process in slower motion and in several stages, following a logic that operates behind the backs of the actors –the cunning of perverse reason, as in a Shakespearean tragedy or in a heavier Hegelian tome.
Faced with a choice of two disreputable candidates, and through the convoluted process of indirect election, Americans managed to get a strange result that leaves everybody perplexed. Now they have to live with an unpredictable outsider who has challenged the establishments of both major parties and who may manage to demolish the institutional fabric of the republic as it was established in the late 18th century –a true accabador, as I have explained in a previous article for Opinion Sur[4].
Over the years many cherished American institutions have been hollowed. The bipartisan system got entangled in a gridlock which affected governance and produced a vacuum at the top. This in turn created the opportunity for an outsider to occupy that top. The first upshot is that politics has become divisive inside each party, paralyzed between parties, authoritarian at the executive level, and extra-parliamentary in opposition, which, without traditional party channels, has moved to the streets. This prompts another book recommendation: the somewhat forgotten book by Elias Canetti, Massen und Macht [5](Crowds and Power), which, together with other lovely texts, got him the Nobel Prize (for literature, since there has never been a prize for social science, and the dismal science had not yet joined the fray).
As I have written before, the transition from Obama’s administration to Trump’s unstable congregation goes beyond a change of government. It is a change of regime. Many Trump supporters celebrate his advent as a return to an imagined America, which they no longer recognize in the global, multicultural, high-tech present, and they wish to capture it back.
The paradoxes abound. Working-class anger gave support to a government staffed by plutocrats, not precisely worker-friendly. Protection policies result in a hollow mercantilism. Trump trumpets industrial policies without the industry. Mexicans and Chinese are blamed for the replacement of jobs –by robots. The retreat from multilateral treatises accelerates the regional and possibly the global rise of China. The list of paradoxes, unintended consequences, and sheer contradictions is long.
The likely rapprochement with Russia may have benefits in the fight against international terrorism[6] but will force the US to share the prize, and the price in prestige. America will no longer set the agenda. The new American president’s statement that NATO is “obsolete” contains a grain of truth, but not the whole truth. By the same token, it signals the obsolescence of the American-designed post WWII order. In the past, what was good for the goose (US) was good for the gander (Europe). Today, what is bad for the gander (EU) is bad for the goose (US). As they said in the 16th century “as deep drinketh the Goose as the Gander” but the drink will be vodka this time. And there are new geese in the flock. Russia is rising, China is rising. In relation to Russia, American policy makers and pundits have often remarked that a declining nuclear armed former superpower can cause a lot of harm. In relation to the USA I would add: de te fabula narratur (fable refers to you) that a declining former single superpower can also cause a lot of harm if it does not adjust to a new reality of great-power relations which it cannot dominate any more. Under Trump the US seems to have adopted a posture of belligerent retrenchment[7]. The risks of war are higher than before.
The new president is riding a sort of wave of popular reaction that is a concoction of legitimate grievances, nostalgia, and scapegoating. The situation is not unique to America. The specter of popular reaction runs through the entire Western world. What will the new president deliver for his electoral base, a foul-mouthed billionaire who will entertain the populace with a festival of scandals and a few witch-hunts while he gives large gifts to the rich and privileged, and to his impoverished supporters some sops[8]? After the election, I can testify that the atmosphere is increasingly tense.
In such atmosphere –the despondency of some, the defiance of others, and the vengeful celebration of many—my annual pilgrimage to Italy at year’s end provided a reprieve from the crossfire and an opportunity to remember and reflect.
I will spare the reader of these notes one more comparison between Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi. Others have done so already, and most on the level of anecdote. For those interested in a serious exercise along these lines I recommend one book: Maurizio Viroli’s The Liberty of Servants. Berlusconi’s Italy.[9] During my Italian tour more distant visions occupied my mind. The US is not Italy. Issues in America have an immediate global impact, rising well above the anecdotal, the folkloric, and the parochial American bent towards identity politics. Here I am talking of raw global power, that is geo-politics[10]. Perhaps a more apt comparison is with ancient Rome.
Back to Paestum. In January its solitude (there were no tourist crowds) gave me the sensation of a haunted place, full of echoes from past chores and the muted voices of the dead. My feet stepped on the remnants of the Greek agora and the Roman forum, places where ancient citizens used to meet and make deals, among them an exchange of ideas under the guidance of Mens Bona. And I recalled how this came to an end, in stages first, and then abruptly, until those early imperfect versions of a government of the people, by the people, for the people perished from the earth.
Along such process of defeasance a decisive step was taken by Julius Caesar on January 10, 49BC (exactly 2066 years before my visit to the ruins of Paestum). Faced with prosecution for war crimes, Caesar had to submit or rebel. On that date he chose to defy the Republic and advance on Rome at the head of his troops. In their superstitions Romans thought that certain rivers should not be crossed, like the Rio del Olvido in Galicia, Spain[11], and they thought the same about Rubicon, the river that runs from the Apennine mountains to the Adriatic sea. Caesar crossed it and history changed.
This defiance, and the ensuing civil war, did not bode well for the Republic. The latter was an oligarchy that rested on what Max Weber called “competitive elitism” (proto-democracy), with one faction leaning on the popular Assembly and the other on the aristocratic Senate. Caesar abolished this two-party game, while assuming the mantle of one of them: the populares. In fact, many of Caesar’s measures indeed seemed to protect the ordinary people against the selfish policy of the nobles of the establishment, but he did this as a way to establish a strong base for a personal regime. His trick was clever, and successful: extending citizenship to the “forgotten outsiders” –those who had fought for Rome but did not enjoy its privileges. Ever since then caesarism is a name used to characterize authoritarian populism.[12] I think the parallel with the present day is clear.[13]
Julius Caesar’s dictatorship was short lived. Faced with the prospect of tyranny the Roman senators used the only resort they thought appropriate to temper it –tyrannicide. But the harm was done. Far from returning to the republican balance of power, Rome plunged once more into civil war until Octavianus, Caesar’s designated heir and adopted son, having vanquished his rivals, assumed total power as emperor Augustus and inaugurated the famed pax romana. The Republic was never officially disavowed. Augustus was a consummate PR man. The magistrates became legally and practically subservient to one citizen with power over all. Republican institutions were kept but only as a façade. They had become empty shells.
The imperial regime was brittle though. Despite the Augustan peace, it was frequently challenged from without and from within. The succession was extremely irregular. It was a fitful empire. Of the 85 emperors in Roman history, there were only 5 reputedly good ones, with Marcus Aurelius standing above the rest. Yet no fewer than 17 were assassinated. Rome experienced imperial overreach and internal corruption. It declined and disappeared as the world’s greatest power. It left behind a spectacular legacy to which I and others still pay homage today, but it died.
Back from my ruins, in Trump’s America, I feel it merits posing the question again: Are we Rome?
[1]Curzio Malaparte, Coup d’Etat: The Technique of Revolution, New York: Dutton, 1932.
[2] Edward N. Luttwak, Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook, revised edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016
[3] Juan E. Corradi, The Fitful Republic, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985.
[4] “The accabadors: A brief sarcastic account of the European disunion,” Opinion Sur,
[5] First published in 1960. English edition in 1984.
[6] See the proposal by Luis Moreno Ocampo: https://www.justsecurity.org/36449/trump-work-russia-challenge-status-quo-control-isis/
For an opposite view, see Daniel Benjamin, “Russia is a Bad Ally Against Terrorism,” Op ED, The New York Times, January 23, 2017.
[7] “South China Sea: U.S. Will Defend International Territories From China, White House Says,” Stratfor, January 24, 2017. This is the Rand Corporation analysis: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1100/RR1140/RAND_RR1140.pdf
[8] With a favorable tax policy for corporations and the rich, cash may return to the US but it is likely to fuel more mergers and acquisitions than the creation of jobs. Manufacturing employment is likely to fall, not rise. The repeal of the Affordable Care Act will leave millions without coverage. This is hardly a recipe for sustained support, unless international tensions feed a zeal for war abroad and repression at home.
[9] Maurizio Viroli, The Liberty of Servants. Berlusconi’s Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
[10] The concept of soft power has in my view run its course as a prolonged academic oxymoron. Today Carl Schmitt is more relevant than Joseph Nye.
[11] Legend has it that those who cross it don’t know who they are anymore.
[12] Franz Neumann, “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1957.
[13] “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left. […]The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer” (from Donald Trump’s inaugural address).
