Raison d'état

 Trump's Christmas season tweet-storms about invading Panama and annexing Greenland followed a pattern that has become all too familiar. First, he will log onto his social media platform and say something obscene and outrageous—like signaling that he plans to commit the international war crime of aggression by invading the sovereignty of another nation and unilaterally abrogating the terms of a US treaty (with a country that is a close ally, at that!). 

Then, amidst their consternation, people will try to make some kind of sense of it. Where is this bizarre provocation coming from? Next, the rationalizations will start. And by the end of the day, what had begun just a few hours before as a megalomaniacal absurdity has suddenly acquired an air of inevitability. Welp, people start to think—I guess we're invading Panama and Greenland!

The coverage of Trump's imperialistic threats followed this mould exactly. At first, people were shocked. Then, the geopolitical rationales started to trickle in: "well," people said, "I guess Greenland is strategically important in our tug-of-war with Russia for the Arctic. I guess it does have mineral reserves that the U.S. might want to get its hands on." And: "well, maybe we could ward off Chinese influence in South America if we retook direct control of the Panama Canal..."

What's striking about these arguments, of course, is that they utterly bypass any moral considerations about the rights of other people—such as the Panamanians or the Greenlanders. They argue strictly on grounds of short-term self-interest, as if that alone were sufficient to justify any action by the state. In short, these arguments cite the principle of "raison d'état" as a self-justifying principle. They therefore partake of what Johan Huizinga calls the "amoral theory of the state"—brute realpolitik at its worst. 

 Of course, many will say—well yeah, what did you expect? That's what states do. "So [man] will be, though law be clear as crystal/ Tho' all men plan to live in harmony..." to quote a line from a Vachel Lindsay poem. In other words—many argue that brute, gut-level self-interest will always govern the conduct of states on the international plane, regardless of so-called laws, treaties, or compacts, because that's human nature, and there is no universal sovereign to constrain states' actions in stronger ways. 

And indeed, probably all states do pursue their short-term self-interest for the most part. The reason why Panama currently has such a pro-US president is probably because of the variety of forms of soft power that our country already wields in the region—and which have rightly been described many times before as a form of neo-imperialism. And our adversaries do the same—so one can always point to the argument that "if we don't do it, someone else will."

There may then, in fact, only be a minor difference between the raw, brutish violations of the rights of other nations that Trump is talking about—the conquest and invasion that he seems to have in mind—and the ordinary course of expansion and self-promotion that our country routinely engages in around the world, under the color of law. But, small as that difference may be—it is nonetheless a real and essential one. It is absolutely worth preserving. 

In other words, even if some degree of self-interest may always shape relations between the United States and other nations—there is still an actual moral difference between invading Panama and Greenland, as Trump seems to be proposing, and—say—trying to ward off potential Russian or Chinese influence in either country through offering foreign aid or cultivating closer ties with their elected leadership. Even if it's only a difference in degree—it's enough of one to matter. 

As Huizinga puts it, in condemnation of the "amoral theory of the state," in his prophetic 1936 book In the Shadow of Tomorrow: "States will continue to set their course predominantly by their interests or what they think to be their interests, and considerations of international morality will drive them only a fraction of an inch off this course. But this fraction represents the difference between honor and loyalty and the jungle, and as such reaches further than a thousand miles of ambition and violence." 

Vachel Lindsay reached roughly the same conclusion, in the poem already quoted. While it may be true that human nature is every bit as selfish as people say—that is no reason to make even less effort than we do already to constrain it by principles of law and equity and fair play. "Come," he says, at the end of the poem: "let us vote against our human nature." That is all I ask with regard to international politics as well. States may indeed be destined to be selfish—but we can nonetheless use the small political choices we have to try to make them less so. 

Plus, even if selfishness is inevitable, there's also such a thing as long-term self-interest to consider. Trump seems to be having a ball right now wielding US leverage over other nations and squandering whatever political capital we still have with our allies by extorting any concessions he can get from them. He has spent the last several weeks—before he's even retaken office—bullying one US strategic ally and trading partner after another: Mexico, Canada, the Eurozone, and now—Panama and Denmark. 

But eventually, this strategy proves to have diminishing returns. As Huizinga puts it: "Without mutual trust a community of human beings or States is impossible. A State which emblazons [...] 'Do not trust me' on its shield [...] could only exist in a like-minded world by maintaining an absolute superiority of power over all other States combined." 

Whatever gains Trump thinks he can successfully extort from our allies in the short term, then—it is undeniable that he is meanwhile eroding that mutual trust that alone makes alliances possible. By doing so, he is indeed emblazoning the words "Do Not Trust Me" on our national seal. It is only a matter of time before these actions alienate everyone who might otherwise have stood with us. We then truly will have to conquer or die—and the amoral logic of "raison d'état" will become self-fulfilling. 

I don't know how else to read the slogan "America First" except as a particularly vulgar and simple-minded statement of the same principle of raison d'état—of the "amoral theory of the State." And as such, the slogan might as well read: "Do Not Trust Me," just as Huizinga says. From "Don't Tread on Me" to "Don't Trust Me"—a sad story, in two phrases, of the decline of American honor. 

But maybe—in all this overheated Christmas Day rhetoric—Trump was just kidding? This is indeed how people have interpreted his recent mockery of Canada as the "51st state," for instance. He's just joking, people say. He's "trolling." 

But here too, Huizinga offers a prophetic warning. In his 1936 book, he warns against the rise of what he calls a dangerous confusion between the spheres of play and seriousness, which has trapped people in a kind of permanent adolescence. He dubs this phenomenon "puerilism" (and develops the theme further in a later book, Homo Ludens). We might today call it "trolling." It is what Elon Musk tries to do all day long on ex-Twitter (though Trump is much better at it).

This form of puerile joking—this "trolling"—is marked by its lack of any clear boundaries. How often have we said of Trump: "it's impossible to tell when he's kidding and when he's serious." And it is precisely this quality of confusion, in Huizinga's view, that distinguishes genuine playfulness (which is a positive and indeed necessary aspect of culture, he says) from distorted "puerilism"—which he thinks (and I would agree) is extremely dangerous for society. 

"The most fundamental characteristic of true play," he writes, "[...] is that at a certain moment it is over. The spectators go home, the players take off their masks, the performance has ended. And here the evil of our time shows itself. For nowadays play in many cases never ends and hence it is not true play. A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place." 

It is undeniable that this is a particularly pronounced and dangerous feature of our time as well. When Trump fires off endless megalomaniacal, bombastic, trollish, and semiserious tweets, he is not truly playing—he is being puerile. We know it because there is no point at which Trump ever packs the game in and declares playtime over. Instead, he keeps up a permanent performance as a kayfabe heel—a reality TV villain—while simultaneously wielding actual globe-spanning power as president-elect of the United States. 

This, surely, is puerilism at its worst and most dangerous, in just the way Huizinga defines it. And I could scarcely imagine anything more puerile than erecting the ultimate trollish slogan—"America First"—the cranky toddler's version of foreign policy ("Me First!")—the outright declaration of sheer national egotism above all else—as the explicit doctrine of our foreign policy. 

If what you seek is short-term gains in raw power and advantage—such a doctrine might yield something. But as a strategy for, shall we say, winning friends and influencing people in the long term, it certainly will not get us far...