We are cursed by what the historian Barbara Tuchman calls the “bellicose
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Grand Illusion
We are cursed by what the historian Barbara Tuchman calls the “bellicose
frivolity of senile empires.”
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international
niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake,
that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by
power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the
beginning of time.” — Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026.
“He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world,
where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a
saying may sound hard; but, after all, that’s how it is.” — Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf
“The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here
the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as
understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or
commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical... Fascism sees in the
imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a
manifestation of their vitality.” — Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism
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Made in the USSA - by Mr. Fish
All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the
empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey.
But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and
hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of
others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice. Ekpyrosis, the inevitable
conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part
of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time
for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with
weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.
Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen
Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no
different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past —
the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial
Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were
followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf
Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.
These political entities committed collective suicide.
They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House
imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They
too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face
of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.
Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is
one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other
nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.
These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are
ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed
slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the
message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the
golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of
ultranationalism. The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.
“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” wrote Yugoslav-Serbian
novelist Danilo Kiš. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy
way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values
are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he
belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no
concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They
don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own
image — as nationalists.”
These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They
terrorize. They kill. The art of power politics between nations or individuals
is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence — emotional
and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new
alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them.
Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative.
But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires
getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions,
this is an impossibility.
Skillful diplomats, such as Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian
Empire’s foreign minister who dominated European politics after the defeat of
Napoleon, do so by crafting agreements and treaties such as the Concert of
Europe and the Congress of Vienna. Metternich, no friend of liberalism,
adroitly kept Europe stable until the revolutions of 1848.
I reported on Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state, as he
negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia. He was bombastic and enthralled with
his own celebrity. But he played the Balkan warlords off each other in the
former Yugoslavia until they acquiesced to stop the fighting — with some help
from NATO warplanes that pounded Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo —
and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.
Holbrooke had little regard for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls
in Geneva while 100,000 people died or disappeared in Bosnia, an estimated
900,000 became refugees and 1.3 million were internally displaced. He had a
loathing for military commanders who refused to take risks. He detested the
Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders he had to corral into signing the peace
accord.
Holbrooke, whose blustering style and volcanic eruptions were legendary, left
bruised egos and slighted, embittered colleagues in his wake. But he knew how
to cajole and mold his adversaries to his will. He was likened, in a not very
flattering comparison, to Jules Cardinal Mazarin, the crafty 17th-century
prelate and statesman who solidified France’s supremacy among the European
powers. “He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and
schizophrenic Mazarin,” a French diplomat told Le Figaro, of Holbrooke, during
the Dayton talks.
True.
But Holbrooke, however mercurial, understood the interplay between force and
diplomacy. This understanding is essential. It is why nations have diplomats.
It is why great diplomats are as important as great generals.
Gangster states have no need of diplomacy. Trump and Rubio, for this reason,
have gutted the State Department, along with other forms of “soft” power that
achieve influence without resorting to force, including the U.S. role in the
United Nations, the U.S. Agency of International Development, the U.S.
Institute for Peace — renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace after most of
the board and staff were fired — and Voice of America.
Diplomats in gangster states are reduced to the role of errand boys. Hitler’s
Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose primary experience in foreign
affairs before 1933 was selling fake German champagne in Britain, appointed
party hacks from the SA or Brownshirts — the paramilitary wing of the party —
to diplomatic posts abroad. Benito Mussolini’s Foreign Minister was his
son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini — who believed that “war is to man what
maternity is to woman” — later executed Ciano for disloyalty. Trump’s Special
Envoy to the Middle East, Steven Charles Witkoff, is a real estate developer,
often accompanied on diplomatic missions by Trump’s feckless son-in-law Jared
Kushner.
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce quipped that fascism had created a
fourth form of government, “onagrocracy,” a government by braying asses, to add
to Aristotle’s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.
Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled
democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed
long before the arrival of fascism. Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease,
inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it.
“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and
commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end
produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson
wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic.”
He warned:
The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of
government — a republic — that would prevent this from occurring. But the
combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military
Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican
structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our
democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down
that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play — isolation,
overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy.
Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.
The American Empire, defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan — as it was at the Bay of
Pigs and in Vietnam — learns nothing. It leaps into each new military fiasco as
if the previous military fiascos did not happen. It believes it needs no
allies. It will rule the world.
If occupying Greenland blows up NATO, so what? If funding and arming Israel to
carry out genocide and bombing Iran and Yemen alienates huge swaths of the
Global South and enrages the Muslim world, who cares? If invading and
kidnapping the president of Venezuela stinks of Yankee imperialism, tough! No
one else matters.
Nations that stomp around the globe like King Kong infect themselves with a
fatal virus.
Johnson warned that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman
Republic did, we will “lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual
blowback that imperialism generates.”
Blowback is next and with it the collapse of the crumbling edifice of the
American Empire. It is an old story. Although to us, and the cabal of misfits
ensconced in our version of Ubu Roi’s court, it will come as a terrible shock.
Chris Hedges
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