Trump's USA will lose
They think they know what power is – they are wrong
Published 22.15
Donald Trump's advisors think they know what power is – but they are reading history backwards.
A USA that continues on this path will lose.
For many people, nothing seems more seductive than the feeling of being right.
Especially if it also means that they have seen through something. That they have seen something that almost no one else sees.
Scroll for a few minutes on X, and you will see hundreds of examples: People who insist that a clip on Youtube is the truth, and all the world's accumulated knowledge is a lie.
This certainty of belief is often turbocharged by a kind of reverse reasoning:
Because those I dislike think one thing, my utterly stupid alternative must be right.
It is impossible to understand the Trump administration's ongoing world upheaval without this strange conspiratorial self-confidence.
What the White House gang believes they have understood above all is that the principles, institutions and rules that generations of Americans and Europeans have embraced have been nothing more than slush and nonsense.
That the silk mitten is best used as a comforter, and that all that can be taken seriously is the steel glove.
That the only thing that really counts is power.
- We live in a world, the real world, that is ruled by strength, that is ruled by power, that is ruled by power.
That's what Trump advisor Stephen Miller says.
- These are the iron laws of history since the beginning of time.
It is a view as dangerous as it is wrong.
Those who have confessed to it throughout history have one thing in common:
They have lost.
The first time we encounter these ”iron laws” is on the Greek island of Melos 2442 years ago, when the Athenian envoy threatens the Melians with a variation of Stephen Miller’s words.
What is right depends only on the ability of power to subdue, the historian Thucydides has the Athenians say.
The strong do what they are able to do. The weak endure what they must.
This supposedly eternal truth then immediately seems to prove itself.
The Athenians slaughter the Melians, and I must assume that Stephen Miller triumphantly finished reading there.
Twelve years after the massacre on Melos, Athens had lost the war, not least because the city had been abandoned by many of its exploited “allies”.
In this particular case, history repeats itself.
Time and again, other states join forces to bring an overconfident hegemon to its knees.
It was the German Empire’s “realism” and constant references to “the law of naked power politics,” notes historian Paul Kennedy, that helped unite the other great powers against Germany during World War I.
It is in this light that the US’s achievement over the past 80 years is so historically exceptional, argues Harvard professor Stephen Walt:
Not only was the US the world’s most powerful state—it was also able to lead the world’s most powerful coalition of states.
Formerly self-willed countries like Germany and Japan submitted—and became richer and more successful than ever.
Europe, the most warlike continent in history, experienced its most peaceful era.
An unprecedented prosperity emerged in our part of the world.
The miracle was based on the fact that the US did not abuse its role. Power was used for the benefit of all the countries that crouched under Pax Americana – it didn’t suck them out because the US is the best, and deserves to win the most.
Hard power is important.
The winner in a knife fight tends to be the one who brings the gun.
But along the roadsides of history lie drifts of autocrats and dictators who believe that hard power is enough.
Even though what it builds can never last.
When Winston Churchill suggested in 1945 that the Pope would be unhappy with a Soviet proposal about the future of Poland, Josef Stalin stroked his own mustache:
– How many divisions did you say the Pope has?
That was fun.
8 years later Stalin was dead.
38 years after that his entire empire.
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