Trump, The American Caligula, Is A Gigantic Waste Of Time For The United States
One ruler had a penchant for gilded palaces, poorly-executed jokes, financial irresponsibility, and nepotism. The other was a Roman emperor who thought about making his horse a consul.
Is Jared Kushner the American equivalent of a horse-consul? Perhaps it’s Sean Spicer? Kellyanne Conway and Betsy DeVos both feel right as well.
This comparison isn’t just to be glib, though that’s certainly in fashion amongst the Resistance. Rather, it’s to illustrate a wider point.
As Caligula’s excesses and buffoonery represented lost opportunities for the Roman Empire, so too does the presidency of Donald Trump, whose own over-the-top leadership and clear political incompetence squander the power of a great nation-state.
Caligula, famously, helped spark the Jewish Revolt of 66–70 CE, when he dismissed Jewish petitions against Roman misgovernment by asking why Jews didn’t eat pork. Caligula was long dead by the revolt, assassinated by his bodyguard (perhaps our equivalent of Paul Ryan filing articles of impeachment?). Yet the four short years of his reign, from 37–41 CE, represented a lost opportunity to stifle that rebellion decades before it happened. Imagine if Caligula could have imitated Augustus Caesar, who handled Jewish politics with finesses. Would the Temple of Solomon still stand today, rather than being pulled down by Roman legionaries?
If we look at Trump through the Caligula lens, we must look beyond just the personal excess and gilded palaces, past the emperor’s orgies and Trump’s reputed golden showers, and to the conditions behind them.
As Caligula led a secure Roman Empire threatened by only by the mumbles of great disruption, so too does Trump. Caligula’s amoral rule did not bring down the Empire, since in the 1st Century the Empire was too well-organized and its enemies too weak. That collapse would come hundreds of years later, the result of a confluence of conditions that Caligula’s rule helped continue, but did not single handedly cause.
The same can be said of Trump’s rule. Like Caligula, there are no great rivals to the United States: no Soviet Union, a China that still adheres to a peaceful rise, nothing but the battering of Sunni supremacist barbarians at the gates of the superpower. The territorial integrity of the U.S. itself is not even remotely in question; Putin’s wild-eyed gambit to force a California secession ended in laughs. Its allies, some of whom are alarmed by the current White House, are content to wait out Trump.
Yet beyond the maximum 8 years of a Trump presidency, great challenges loom. None of them are being addressed by Trump. If Caligula’s malfeasance helped spark the Jewish Revolt, with its far-ranging consequences, and did nothing to alleviate the excesses of the Caesarian imperial system, Trump threatens to cause wars that might otherwise be avoided while reinforcing all that is irrational about the United States.
Giving away the Pacific
Remember the Transpacific Partnership, the Obama-led neoliberal free trade treaty despised by both Left and Right during the election this year? Supposedly Trump’s refusal to sign killed it. Yet the deal carries on, with a meeting last week in Hanoi where 11 nations minus the United States affirmed it would go ahead. It stills excludes China; it still gathers all those worried about Beijing’s growing geopolitical clout under a single tent.
Now Trump has given away this potentially powerful treaty to — well, it appears to Japan, the proposed treaty’s biggest economy and former world warrior.
Japan is still a reliable American ally. In and of itself a Tokyo-dominated TPP will not produce the old conditions of the 1920s and 30s. Fear of a rising China will continue to bridge divides between Washington and Tokyo.
Unless China stops rising, or Beijing joins an American or Japanese-led bloc. Through small bricks like TPP, there can suddenly emerge a wall between Japan and the United States.
Which could all be avoided, were the American president wise enough to keep those bricks from even being laid.
Wasting time with the Saudis
The great rivalry between the Saudis and Iranians is another point. From the widest standpoint, the United States need two or three Middle Eastern regional powers to keep energy flowing and terrorism at bay. It has in its pocket Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, though Israel is increasingly useless for these tasks.
Yet Saudi Arabia’s anti-terror track record is poor; its state ideology, though slowly being challenged from within, is fertile soil for suicide-bombing Sunni supremacists.
Iran, once the capital of terror, now fights counter-insurgency wars in Syria and Iraq against Sunni supremacists. Moreover, its own people just reelected a president who campaigned on greater cooperation with the rest of the world.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, can’t trust its people to elections: they might well choose a hardline caliph.
It’s not that Iran is perfect; far from it. It’s that Saudi Arabia is way less valuable to the United States. It has a smaller population (19 million to Iran’s 79 million) and fewer resources besides oil (Saudi Arabia has no rivers, lacks arable land, and has almost no forests). As sanctions ease, it has the potential to produce a much more complex economy.
And it’s governing system is evolving, whereas Saudi Arabia’s is almost totally stagnant. Stagnant systems tend to get overthrown; making bets on a Saudi revolution is becoming less crazy by the year. Will the U.S. waste time and power on trying to save the Saudis from a future revolution? Or will it be an Iran ’79 redux, only this time will the United States have no friend across the Gulf to fall back on?
What’s worse is that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have made this an either or choice. To take advantage of Iran’s power is to alienate the Saudis, and vice versa. If the game must be zero sum, Iran gives far more advantage to the U.S. than Saudi Arabia.
Pretending Russia’s Putin isn’t a problem
The grossest neglect is with Russia. Each president from Clinton on down has tried and failed to build a permanently amiable relationship with Vladimir Putin. The problem is twofold: Russia’s current nature — it’s sitting on former imperial borders with quite a few secessionist movements and it has an overly centralized governing structure that creates both corruption and autocracy — and Putin’s interpretation of that nature. Putin does not see security in alliance or cooperation with the West; he sees it as a threat that will either naively break up the Russian Federation or as an imperialist fellow traveler who will subjugate Moscow for its own benefit.
Thus it is impossible to build a lasting relationship with Putin’s Russia; it will remain an adversary so long as Putin commands it.
Trump’s futzing over the election hacking delays the inevitable reckoning any White House must have with this Kremlin. His chummy photo ops with Russian officials, while excluding American media, simply waste more time while Russian power seeps into Europe and tries to sway elections across the continent.
Such behavior leads to two outcomes, both of which are bad for the United States. Either Putin succeeds, divides up Europe, and forces the next American president to try to put the pieces back together, or Europeans conclude the U.S. no longer will protect them as it once did, and conclude they need to rearm and mobilize.
An independent European military is a disaster for the United States; it will almost certainly challenge the U.S. somewhere in the century. While today’s older Germans might recoil in horror at the thought of German tanks being used for anything but movie sets, there’s no reason to believe this attitude is permanent. When countries build great armies, they tend to use them.
Failing to deal with Republican ideological rot
And here Trump compares to all the worst elements of the Caligula era. Both men represent the epitome of the systems they ruled. Caligula took power under less than clear legal circumstances; Suetonius notes he might have murdered his adoptive grandfather, the Emperor Tiberius, and then changed the emperor’s will to make himself heir.
The whole affair demonstrated the rather wretched way power was transferred in the Empire. As time went on, the inefficiency of this system led to civil war upon civil war until the Empire collapsed. The ideological roots of this practice involved Roman tradition worship, which sanctified civil war as a means to power because great Romans like Julius Caesar did it. There were other serious ideological problems with the Empire, none of which were addressed as Caligula built his fleet of pleasure boats and dithered about his palaces.
There are varying ideologies in the United States that are a long-term threat to the survival of both the republic and the nation-state it presides over. The worst offenders are on the Right. They range from white supremacy’s irrational view of America’s human capital to the Laffer Curve-worshipping tax center analysts who would bankrupt the Treasury to pay off CEOs to the corporate-cum-Evangelical science denialists who risk letting the U.S. be caught flat footed by the sure-fire geopolitical catastrophe of climate change.
The Left has demons too; identitarians and cultural Marxists threaten the country’s stability through endless cultural purges and have their own ideological sinews for totalitarianism.
But these demons do not dominate the Democratic Party, let alone win big elections; the Right’s demons very much do.
There are virtually no major planks of the GOP that do not represent, in some form or another, a long-term threat to the United States’ integrity. Slashing the size of the state, cutting taxes, and deregulating will increase wealth inequality, which invites unrest and even revolution on a long enough timeline. (The Laffer Curve is largely bunk). Denying climate change will accelerate and worsen it; that will eventually create hundreds of millions of climate change refugees who will surely come seeking help from or revenge on the U.S. And continuing to dog whistle white supremacists risks both further, pointless civil unrest, while limiting access to the human capital of minorities that will keep America’s superpower status.
The Trump era convinces both GOP officials and voters that their largely bankrupt ideas retain any semblance of credibility. Political ideas die hard deaths; in democracies, it can take several voting cycles to end a bad idea. Alas for the United States, it had a chance to bury some of this beneath a 2016 Clinton victory. It did not take that chance. Now future generations will have to wait for salvation begun four years too late.
The ugly reckoning
The Roman Empire had another four centuries as a European superpower before its inequities and ideological excesses allowed less advanced nomadic tribes to overcome it. The United States today is much closer to Rome’s 1st Century heyday than its 5th Century doomsday. To bring about the same kinds of conditions as Rome’s fall, the U.S. would need to have lost territory, have a shrinking base of allies, and be suffering severe economic and social disruption far beyond the scale of the Great Recession. This would be civil war type stuff, not Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter protests.
Yet the world also moves much faster than Rome’s era. Empires rise and fall much swifter than they once did; the Soviet Union became a superpower only after World War II, and could only maintain that position for a mere 50 years before it fell in 1991. The U.S. is more stable than the old USSR, but that does not mean that if America’s inefficiencies are not dealt with, and soon, that it will survive to the 22nd century.
