Something Stupid

As the apeirokinetic pantoustasis rolls ever onward, it is increasingly clear that this must be the darkest timeline.* It is at any rate the stupidest. Reason, analysis and theory have little purchase on events, leading only into a dark place of aporia and despair – even if you can keep up with the constant barrage of random idiocy, making sense of it simply confirms that there is little sense to be found. Perhaps Melanie Klein may be able to help, since so many important decisions these days seem to be different forms of childish acting out. Mostly, one suspects that the best means of coming to terms with the world, without giving in to the death drive, may be to join everyone else and stop trying to discipline the id. Why forego that bit of cake when tomorrow Trump might decide to bomb Europe in order to construct more golf courses?

This continues to be a bad time to try to finish a book on how Thucydides might help us understand politics. However much Thucydides may have anticipated a lot of ideas about cognitive biases and failures in deliberation, even at its worst Athenian democracy doesn’t seem to have been quite so self-destructively stupid as so many modern states. More than this, however, Thucydides has actually become part of the stupidity. The fake ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote continues to be used to promote assorted toxic masculinities (even if Pete Hegseth himself hasn’t come out with it yet, a load of his fans have). The ‘Thucydides Trap’ continues to be applied, more or less randomly, to anything that looks like a potential conflict; Trumpiam foreign policy is either a manifestation of it or a brilliant attempt at averting it, apparently, likewise the inevitable clashes between Bitcoin and old-fashioned normal money, AI and outmoded human systems, state support and the new libertarian future… Basically it’s become a way of asserting the inevitable triumph of Thing X, in the all-too-familiar ‘there is no alternative, we must change in order to stay the same’ manner – ‘Thucydides’ tells us that conflict is now less something to be averted, as in Allison’s original formulation for US-China relations, and more something to be welcomed and promoted as a means to an end, bringing the future into being in an accelerationist manner.

And of course there’s Melos, references to which have escalated in recent weeks. Some of this is straightforward re-litigation of the invasion in a familiar register (as discussed here a couple of years ago), sometimes by social media accounts that look remarkably like Russia-affiliated bots and sometimes by gormless real accounts that might as well be Russian bots – along with familiar responses that Melos didn’t end well for Athens and so it’s implausible that Thucydides was endorsing the Athenian position. More striking are the cases that see the Dialogue – or rather the only line from it that most people know – not as an analysis of power dynamics but as a straightforward celebration of untrammelled power: not just the representatives of the US regime throwing Ukraine under the bus and disdaining European allies and the ‘rules-based international order’ in the name of “the weak suffer what they must”, but Elon Musk and his pimply stormtroopers taking sledgehammers to the American state and constitution. A marginally more refined or pretentious version of “cry moar, libs”, essentially.

It makes slightly more sense to see the trope applied to the Trumpian intimidation of Ukraine, with the latter framed as the weaker party who should get with the programme and recognise the hopelessness of the situation; it’s just interesting to see this relationship now being openly framed as one of antagonism, as if America has actually entered the war on Russia’s side and is certainly all too happy to see inter-state relations as governed solely by power and threats. What is most irritating here is the way that some are presenting this Thucydides echo as evidence for the Trump regime having a coherent foreign policy strategy, where even to characterise it as ‘Neanderthal Realism’ (as did a recent New York Times piece**) seems to give far too much credit. A good post yesterday by Dan Nexon at Lawyers Guns Money noted the tendency to claim ‘Great Power Competition’ as the (imaginary) unifying theme of US grand strategy in Trump’s first term. Some variant of ‘Realism’ is now being promoted in a similar manner for Trump 2, and this allegedly Thucydidean reading of his behaviour so far is not just an example of this tendency but also, I would suggest, a key means of arguing for its existence, a way of associating random self-interested thuggishness with sonething that looks more like an intellectually coherent strategy. If one defines Realism vaguely enough, then almost anything can be labelled as Realist – but a Thucydides reference shows that it’s the Real, Powerful, Illusionless kind.

If Realism and Thucydides offer us any sort of tool for making sense of the current US regime, it’s not as a template for or theoretical influence on their conscious strategy. Rather, it’s the Melian Dialogue as a critical depiction of the rhetoric and psychology of the powerful, not in the good way, and it’s the less rational and instrumental aspects of ‘realist’ state motivation depicted in Book 1. We can recognise that Trump, Musk and co (and arguably Putin) are driven by interest (but in narrow, possibly self-defeating terms; no nonsense about soft power or building long-term relationships), honour (the constant demand for Respect, as an act of submission) and fear, above all that they are actually weak (it was difficult not to hear the American interviewee on the World Service at about 5.15 GMT this morning, explaining why Ukraine should submit, and not hear something of an American surrender to awesome Russian power as well).

Tim Ruback’s analysis of Thucydides in IR discourse suggests that it serves primarily as a foundation myth and a means of constituting the discipline, rather than a substantive source of ideas or content. Similar references in these discussions of the actual foreign policy strategies of the Trump regime serve a similar function: a means of rhetorically invoking an atmosphere of seriousness and coherence, of constituting a ‘strategy’ out of what a critical observer might reasonably see as a set of random impulses and contradictory responses. It’s Thucydides-washing, a powerful process capable of making the pettiest of street louts into a master of global politics. It is very, very stupid.

*By coincidence, our semi-biennial rewatching of Community has just hit the classic Remedial Chaos Theory episode in season 3, in which rolling a die to decide who has to get the pizza creates six different timelines, at least one of which requires the donning of fake black goatees to commit to the vibe.

** This piece – by Farah Stockman – also offers a rather annoying misreading of the familiar “think about the aftermath of Melos; this shows that Thucydides can’t have endorsed the Athenian line” response to crude Realism, that leaves out the second part of the argument: “But here’s the thing about great powers: They all decline eventually. Neanderthal realism doesn’t save them. After Athens sacked Melos, word of its brutality spread. Its allies turned against it. Athens lost the war. Noble ideas, it turns out, do matter.” No, Athens was already resented by a fair number of its allies/subjects – for goodness’ sake, “we’re less worried about what neutrals sull think of us and more concerned about keeping our allies in line” is one of the Athenian argunents in the Melian Dialogue – and its liking for brutality as a response was already on display in the Mytilene Debate; Athens lost the war because its sense of exceptionalism and untouchability led it to attack Syracuse, and then its allies turned against it. “All great powers decline eventually” is not the actual message here; “All great powers start making stupid decisions and stop getting away with it” plausibly is.