Sometimes one reads or hears something that makes everything fall into place. I feel that this happened to me today when I read Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System, an article by Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman, two American political scientists.

First, it goes without saying that I find much of what Trump’s US has been doing completely appalling. It goes against everything I find right and desirable. My feelings are clear with respect to that, and I don’t think I am the only one who believes that one has to push against it. Fight it within one’s means, but fight it.

Now, if you are playing a game, it is evidently a good idea to try to understand how things look from your opponent’s point of view. To see what one can do about something, to predict the effect of this or that move, one has to try to understand what motivates one’s opponent. One has to understand their rationality and how they interpret the rules of the game. It is not enough to think what one would do if one were one’s opponent. One has to think what one would do if one were one’s opponent and thought like they do. If one’s opponent makes what looks like an evidently wrong move, it might be that they are actually making a wrong move. Or that one is being outsmarted. Or it might be that they are playing by different rules. For them, the objective of the game might be something completely different from what one thinks it is. Things that look irrational—even after ruling out that they are playing 5-dimensional chess—might look totally rational to them. These things might be part of a rational strategy, just one following their own rationality. Theirs might be a strategy that aims to win at a different game than the one you are playing, with different rules and objectives. If that’s the case, one has to take it into consideration. Otherwise, whatever one does will not be effective.

Let’s start by looking at what we are talking about. I guess that to think about whatever the US administration does with respect to European or other states, one has to know what a state is. Here is what some people have said about that:

Max Weber described a state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Weber’s idea of the state, the same enshrined at the end of the Thirty Years’ War and recognized in the UN Charter, implies that states have exclusive sovereignty over their territory, meaning in particular that other states cannot interfere in their internal affairs.

Now, why would states exist?

  • Marx and Engels argued that “the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check.”
  • Aristotle believed that states exist to promote the well-being of their citizens, allowing them to pursue virtue and happiness.
  • For Hobbes, the state is a social contract where individuals gain security and order by surrendering some freedoms to a sovereign authority.
  • Locke saw the goal of the state as preserving property, where “property” includes one’s possessions, life, and liberty.
  • Adam Smith thought the point of the state was to provide public goods.
  • Rousseau claimed that the state expresses the collective will of its people, aiming to promote the common good.

Finally, a government is not the same as the state. Rather, it is an organization to which the state grants authority and the right to act on its behalf. Apparently, one learns that the five major functions of the US government are maintaining national defense, providing public services, preserving order, socializing the young, and collecting taxes.

Now, I am not sure how I would have explained to the being what “the state” and “the government” are, and what the point of having one is. I spent some time looking for the quotes above, but the following minimalist summary seems uncontroversial to me:

  • The state is an entity to which one grants things like the monopoly of violence so that it keeps order, provides public goods and security, and promotes the well-being of citizens according to some notion of the common good.
  • The government is the armed hand of the state, the entity entrusted with achieving the state’s goals.

We might disagree on what things like well-being and common good mean, on how far the state can go to achieve these things, and whether a government is fulfilling its duty or not, but the broad ideas seem uncontroversial to me. Now, they are only uncontroversial if one has in mind the kind of state that first extended gradually in North America and Western Europe from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century, and then further afield until, say, the year 2000.

Even looking just at the US and Europe, it is clear that in that period there have been all sorts of states. Look just at Germany, and you have the Prussian state, Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, East Germany, and the current German state. In France, you have Napoleon III’s empire and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th republics. The pre-Civil War state in the US has little to do with the one before the First World War, the New Deal, or the one arising from the 1960s. And so on. But in one way or another, all those states saw themselves as fitting the description above. I mean, even the Nazis. Their notion of the common good was awful, and their notion of who was a citizen is totally antithetical to what I think, but they definitely saw what they were doing as promoting the common good of the German people.

If one thinks of the state and the government in those terms, what Trump does is incomprehensible. Crazy. He is being counterproductive, regardless of the incarnation of “common good.” In what way does the US state benefit from the Greenland affair? If successful, how exactly would the US benefit from owning it, given that they could have done in Greenland whatever they wanted and have not shown any interest in doing so? How does the US state benefit from whatever happened in Venezuela, especially when oil companies—the primary beneficiaries—say it is uninvestable? How does the US state benefit by enraging its allies, claiming that they had not really been in Afghanistan during the war following September 11th? How does the US state benefit from putting extra tariffs on Canada after the Ontario government paid for an ad featuring Reagan? Or after a speech in Davos? How does the US state profit from insulting all Canadians or Danes? How does the US state benefit by humiliating the South African president during his White House visit? And what about putting 50% tariffs on Brazil because Bolsonaro was jailed, or on India because Modi refused to say that it was Trump who had stopped the India-Pakistan war? How does it profit by destroying the trust of other heads of state by sharing their private communications?

Whatever notion one has of the common good, whatever meaning one gives to “strengthening the US,” all of that is counterproductive. Crazy. Incomprehensible. So much so that it feels impossible to understand what the goals of US policy are, why things are done. Rasmus Jarlov, a member of the Danish Parliament, was saying that sovereignty is a red line, but that the Danes would like to understand and accommodate whatever the US wants in Greenland. Macron’s leaked text the other day read: “I do not understand what you are doing in Greenland.” These are just two examples, but there are plenty of them. What the US is doing makes no sense.

Well, let’s be clear: it makes no sense if one has the conception of the state as we have had it during the last 200 years. Before that, it was different. Louis XIV, the Spanish Habsburgs, the Tudors, the Medicis—they worked under a different ideal. There was a ruler at the head of a small clique, and the policy of the state was directed to benefit the members of that clique. There was no idea of a common good. The state was the property of the ruler, who granted or denied privileges to members of the clique. The goodwill of the rulers was bought with wealth or by providing them with status symbols. Negotiations between states were negotiations between the respective ruling cliques, directed to directly benefit those cliques in terms of wealth and status. Members of the clique who insulted the ruler were punished, and their privileges were withdrawn. The state didn’t belong to the citizens but to the ruler. Parts of the state could be traded because they were the property of the ruler.

Now, in the US, there were the “No Kings” protests. When seen from here, it seemed like a great name for the protest, but it kind of felt like an attempt to match the style of the Tea Party protests, where people dressed up as revolutionary Americans. A good slogan, but a bit ridiculous. At least, it felt that way to me. Less so now.

I mean, the Duke of Normandy disrespects the king, and what happens to his state? Carney gives a speech that displeases Trump, and Canada gets 100% tariffs. The Count of Savoy looks weak and unable to defend this or that valley, and what does the king do? Very much what Trump wants to do with Greenland. The king imposes a mercantilist system, and what do people in his or other cliques do besides paying with wealth and status for the privilege to trade? Current example: Nvidia, and only Nvidia, agrees to pay 15% of its revenue for the permit to export chips to China. Another one: Vietnam is hit with enormous tariffs, which are reduced when a $1.5 billion investment project of the Trump organization is permitted. The Swiss present Trump with a gold bar, and Qatar with a flying palace. A new Emperor comes in place and decides that the previous one had been too lenient with the vassals. When the Imperial Diet meets, does he treat them very differently that Trump treats Nato members? An expedition is organized to conquer this or that island, although it is really costly for the state and will only profit whoever from the clique gets this or that privilege. Last fall, Paul Singer, a generous Trump donor, bought a bunch of US refineries tailored to refine Venezuelan oil. He is the one actually profiting from the Venezuela affair. Trump makes a policy announcement that is going to move the market, and who happens to have the foresight of buying or selling stocks just before? All of that, and there are infinitely many examples, looks like corruption, but Trump and the people around him don’t try to hide it, as they would if they saw it as corruption. There is no corruption—defined as “the abuse of public office for personal gain”—if there is no difference between the state and the clique running the state.

It might feel exaggerated to say that one should think of Trump and the surrounding clique as being driven by a pre-revolutionary (French or American) idea of the state, but if one looks around, there are quite a few more examples of such cliques in the world. I mean, what about the Gulf monarchies? What about Putin’s Russia? Khodorkovsky was a valued member of the clique, a Duke of Normandy, until he displeased Putin. He then lost most of his property—although he is still filthy rich—and landed in jail for 10 years. Russia’s economy is not oligarchic in the sense that a bunch of rich and powerful people run it in committee. Rather, it is Putin who distributes favors and punishments, just having to avoid a palace revolution or the guillotine. Orbán is in the same boat, just much less powerful and hence with less freedom to use the Hungarian state as he wishes. A difference is that Trump is incredibly powerful, having the US military and the US economy at his disposal. Incidentally, with whom does a king feel comfortable discussing, with a republic or with another king?

I am not saying that Trump is playing 5-dimensional chess. He is no Machiavelli. I am just saying that, when trying to understand his behavior, it might be a useful hypothesis to assume that he is acting according to premodern ideas of the state. That might be a good framework for understanding what he does.

Okay, now I am tired and have to cook dinner—marmitako is on the menu—but I will actually continue with this. The article I mentioned earlier would not have fallen into place if I had not also listened to a discussion with the economist Gabriel Zucman on how inequality has exploded and what one can maybe do against it.