Opinion Sur
The overreaching domination of the United States in the present will leave in the future a ramshackle society in the future, in full view of everyone inside and outside.
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Oscar Wilde said sarcastically that prediction is a very difficult art – especially the prediction of the future. In the exact and experimental sciences, the task is quite simple, although always hypothetical and sometimes unsuccessful. In the social sciences the task is so complex that few dare to undertake it to avoid ridicule. Still, in human relationships two things are certain about the future. As the popular English saying goes, they are death and taxes. No one escapes these two, although the attempts have been many – all futile and some funny. I will give an example well known in the Middle East, sometimes attributed to a collection of Persian tales, and sometimes to one of the Arabic tales collected in the Middle East. The Arabian Nights.
A servant from Baghdad (now Iraq), on his way to the market, saw Death with a threatening gesture. Terrified, he asked his master for a horse to flee to Isfahan (now Iran), thinking that he would be safe there. The merchant, feeling pityed, gave him the horse, and the servant fled. In the afternoon, the merchant himself went to the market and also saw Death, who explained to him that he was not threatening the servant, but was surprised to see him in Baghdad, because his date with death was that night in Isfahan.
A notable and more recent case is that of a famous marathon runner from India who continued to train and run until the (probable) age of 114. On July 14 of this year, Fauja Singh left his house to walk, as he did every day to stay in shape. It was there that he was run over and killed by a speeding SUV. For more than a century Singh cheated death by running, but he still couldn’t prevent his sentence from being carried out. Neither the most arrogant nor the most cunning, nor the most fortunate can escape his appointment. The grim reaper always hovers around as the executor of destiny.
We have, however, the imagination to think about what can happen after the inevitable – something like our past summed up on a tombstone by a mischievous sculptor. It is a way of commenting or dialoguing with our offspring. Many call this figure the legacy. What is left of what we have done, and how is it commented?
The future past is a frequent obsession in any statesman or woman and in many others as well. They want to survive as they do. The best case is that of Winston Churchill: “History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.”
With that yardstick, statesmen and women in our times reveal an overwhelming mediocrity. There is no Churchill or its equivalent. None of them has the ability to make history and much less the intention or preparation to write it. Neither in their prudence nor in their audacity do they do memorable things. Among the prudent we can parade the technocrats of the European Union. They are portrayed in William Blake’s fierce description: “Prudence is a rich, old and ugly spinster always courted by Incapacity.” Even more forceful is Max Weber’s prophecy about the future Eurocrats: “Spiritless specialists, heartless hedonists, these nullities imagine that they have reached a stage of humanity superior to all the previous ones.” As for the daring and the authoritarian, they only practice reproach by hurling insults in dung language to cover up half-baked policies. Their legacies will be erased like sand castles – no monuments or epitaphs worth their salt.
In this rather deplorable group of world leaders, a character stands out who is an exception and not exactly because he is good. He is, of course, the current president of the United States. He is an exaggerated man, with exaggerated power in an exaggerated country. All these exaggerations will merit him, when he perishes, an epitaph to which none of his friends and enemies will be able to aspire. The epitaph that I imagine for him is quite well known in the Hispanic world, and its meaning goes back to Ecclesiastes. It reads as follows:
Here lies a man who did good and who did bad.
Evil did very well and good did very badly.
He rests in peace and so do we.
His case is special and not easy to interpret. To do this, it is necessary to separate the personality (undoubtedly pathological, narcissistic and enlarged), from the volume of power (enormous), the style of the substance, the words of things, the impulse of the brakes, the causes of the effects, the short term from the long, the ephemeral from the permanent. In this note I will focus on some geopolitical issues in terms of the impact of the US administration’s measures on the world (dis)order. I must anticipate that, in this area, some of the measures at home will have a great impact beyond the borders. These measurements are as follows in the marked areas:
- Public health
- Scientific research
- Education
- Immigration
- Import substitution
- Separation of state and religion
- Politicization of the institutional order
I will not go into detail on each of these points because they would deserve seminars. To study them, I can refer the reader to a detailed document entitled Project 2025[1], since the executive’s measures sometimes seem to be copied from its text. However, I must warn that the measures do not conform to a rational plan. They are intuitive, erratic, and often contradictory. Many are brutal and executed without scruples. The sum of public power allows it. They have in common the purpose of destroying over the will to build. There are no proposals for alternatives and in several cases (health, basic scientific research, foreign aid, climate change) there will not be. Despite the notorious concentration of power, the net effect of these measures is centrifugal and not centripetal. From a geopolitical perspective, they seriously weaken the hegemony of the United States despite the bravado and arrogance.
American isolationism will have another unintended effect: the defensive imitation of other countries in a stampede of “every man for himself.” Far from creating a new balance between states, anarchy will increase, with an even worse addition: nuclear proliferation. Many will learn the lesson of a bad international actor: North Korea. Whoever has the bomb does not allow himself to be lowered by anyone.
The economic facet of geopolitical isolationism is tariff policy. It can have some positive results in the short term. In the film, he violates all the principles of economic science from its foundation with Adam Smith until today, a discipline that emphasizes bridges, not barriers.
Tariffs are an instrument of political coercion applied to market dynamics. Therefore, their future is uncertain and harmful. In the past, the mercantilist period had disastrous effects (colonialism and competition of empires with state control). On a smaller scale, it is the economic policy of the mafia in the urbi et orbi neighborhoods where it operates.
Here it is necessary to make a little theory. The functional coordination of differentiated institutions —usually spontaneous ones– is the basic structure of every modern society. It determines its power and stability and promotes orderly progress. When differentiation is violated, a series of pathologies are generated, some serious. These occur when there is an overreach of a differentiated sector. I will give some examples to clarify this abstract formulation.
When one institutional sector advances over another and tries to direct it, disasters and dysfunctions occur that affect the entire system. A clear example is the politicization of science in authoritarian regimes, with notorious cases such as Lysenko’s genetics in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the promulgation of “Aryan physics” by National Socialism in the 1930s, or the closure of the Institute of Calculus by an Argentine military dictatorship in the 1960s. Nazi and Soviet ideologies also penetrated the artistic sector with force.
Today we have a vulgar version of that political overreach in the attack on a supposed “woke” culture in the military, academic and artistic sectors by the Republican administration of the United States.
Overreach is not the exclusive patrimony of dictatorships. It also happens in plebiscitary democracies. With his usual insight and ironic expression, Jorge Luis Borges noted this in some oft-quoted sentences:
“For me, democracy is an abuse of statistics. And besides, I don’t think it has any value.
Do you think that to solve a mathematical or statistical problem you have to consult most people? I would say no; So why assume that most people understand politics? The truth is that they do not understand, and they allow themselves to be fooled by a sect of scoundrels, who are usually national politicians. These gentlemen who scatter their portrait, making promises, sometimes threats, in short: bribing.”
Both Plato and Aristotle would agree with this view. Without going so far, in the 17th century the French philosopher Blaise Pascal clearly expressed the general social and political implication of overreaching, and he did so in a society that was just beginning to be modern. According to Pascal, a tyrannical order is an order that claims to reign everywhere, even outside its own domain. In his Thoughts he wrote: “tyranny is a desire for universal domination outside its order.” According to Pascal, overreaching domination is based on force and not on justice, it lacks legitimacy and ends in a social disaster. There is only one sphere where overreach is legitimate: thought. But politics is certainly not.[2]
Despite my scruples about the value of prediction, the final legacy of the current (according to Pascal tyrannical) American regime is for me the following: it will leave a ramshackle country in plain sight both inside and outside.
[1] https://whatisproject2025.net/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=21453594860&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI37m574vljgMVakn_AR0AdBuIEAAYASAAEgJ3wPD_BwE
[2] For those who are interested in a “light” introduction to Pascal’s work, I recommend Antoine Compagnon’s book Un été avec Pascal, Paris: Editions des Equateurs, 2020.
