Americans have had a long-term problem when they talk about the state. At times they have denied having a real state at all in the European sense; at other moments they have believed in a conspiratorial bureaucratic apparatus that controls the machinery of government. This is what Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser, has called “the deep state,” a supposed cabal of long-term bureaucrats who worked from within to frustrate the new President’s authority to reform and reduce the overgrown federal administrative apparatus. Stephen Skowronek, a leading academic analyst of U.S. government institutions, has written that “The Trump presidency conjured the Deep State whenever it met resistance from the institutions it was charged to oversee.”^[i] But the belief in a deep state also exemplifies a long and murky American tradition, embodying what historian Richard Hofstadter notably labeled in 1964 as “the paranoid style” in American politics.^[ii] It emerged notably among the organizers of the Anti-masonic Party in the 1820s and 1830s, the antisemitic adherents of Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and the rightwing Californians of the 1950s who organized the John Birch Society to fight the communists they believed were entrenched underground in the United States.

For those partial to conspiracy theories, financial and banking interests are often suspect. In contrast to farmers or industrialists who invent and make tangible products, financiers allegedly manipulate capitalism as a source of abusive privilege. The early eighteenth-century Dutch and British innovation of granting a consortium of wealthy financiers the right to issue letters of credit and eventually paper money to fund state expenses and commercial needs was adopted by Alexander Hamilton for the new Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress for twenty years in 1791. In 1816 Congress chartered the second bank for twenty years, but it became caught up in the bitter political divisions of the Jacksonian era and was denounced in effect as the deep state of its day. It lost its official status in 1836 and the U.S. Treasury removed its deposits. Recession followed in 1837. Private banks authorized by the individual states took over the function of extending credits and selling notes based often on the speculative value of newly opened territory and the appetite of British industry for southern cotton. Finance in the early republic was often a wild ride.

It was clear after huge territorial acquisitions in 1803, 1819, and 1848, along with the vast expansion of public lands and settlement along the river systems that penetrated its interior, the United States would beckon East Coast and foreign investors. The country had overcome any potential great-power threats, was relentlessly achieving the territorial confinement of its aboriginal population, and demand for its cotton was surging abroad. European colonies overseas generated similar constellations of violence, dispossession, and reappropriation. White North Americans enjoyed the advantage of a contiguous land mass and a sparser indigenous population.

Through the nineteenth century the nation’s state governments remained active in chartering private corporations to undertake the development of roads, canals, and bridges, often granting them privileged financing and the right to collect fees and tolls, although declining to claim outright ownership. The recruitment, conscription, and heavy casualties of the Civil War imposed new medical tasks at the national level, which prompted the organization of the multifunctional U.S. Sanitary Commission. In the decades following the war major bureaucracies were organized to administer interstate transportation, food and drug safety, veterans’ pensions and civil-service reform.

With the twentieth century, the U.S. acquired an island empire from Spain and established administrative agencies to oversee the safety of food and drugs safety, and national parklands. Following World War I, the national government intervened to regulate but not to take over the many emerging radio stations by allocating and auctioning “spectrum space.” Congress formally set up these agencies and approved their budgets, but left their administration to the executive departments -- bequeathing possible conflicts that have resurfaced today. By the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal supplemented overstressed local welfare systems in the face of mass unemployment, commissioned new public works, protected the legal status of labor unions, legislated a national system of pensions that required contributions from employers and employees, and then went on to organize the economy for participation in World War II. Even as public agencies grew, economists around 1930 pointed to the growth of corporate bureaucracies: professional managers, not the traditional founders were becoming the decisive organizers of the agents of the giant corporations. Bureaucracy as such acquired an almost mystical status for academic analysts and media coverage.

These developments transcended political divisions. Republican as well as Democratic administrations contributed to what social scientists would conceptualize as the administrative state. Agencies continued to proliferate. FDR established The Civil Aviation Authority in 1938, which morphed into the Federal Aviation Agency twenty years later. Republican President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1970. The growth of the administrative state was attributed to underlying socioeconomic trends: apolitical responses to industrialization, technological innovation, urban development, mass immigration (despite the effort to restrict it between 1924 and 1965), and a national population that grew from under 4 million at Independence to 130 million in 1940, to today’s 340 million.

The continuing growth of overall government spending as a share of GDP provides one quantitative index as it climbed from about 20 percent before the Great Depression to about 35 percent since the 1960s. Even more revealing was the growing share of public expenditure collected at the national level. Of the approximately 35 percent of American GDP which goes to public expenditures, roughly 60 percent is raised by the federal, i.e., national government, mostly through the individual income tax, a tax on corporate profits, and the social security or payroll taxes split between employers and employees.. These taxes pay for defense, social security pensions, highway infrastructure, national health insurance (Medicare) and the extensive system of hospitals for military veterans, and interest payments on the national debt. 25 to 35 percent of the federal spending, however, flows back in grants to the states and local governments.

Republican Party politicians consistently deplored the size of the public sector, but as the Truman administration in 1949 and 1950 opted for a significant permanent increase in military expenditures, social scientists also warned that a new long-term constellation for public policy decision making was emerging that wove together the Pentagon in particular and the defense industries. The sociologist C. Wright Mills identified the leaders of the state and corporate sectors as “the power elite” as early as 1956,^[iii] (3) (C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956, reprinted 2000) and even President Eisenhower, hardly prone to conspiracy theories, warned about the “military-industrial complex” as he left office in January 1961. The term seemed startling but was based on visible developments. Military expenses, which rose to perhaps 40% of GDP by the end of active fighting in World War II -- a bit lower than in the other combattant powers -- briefly fell to perhaps 5 percent of the federal budget from 1946 through 1949, but then rose again with Cold War rearmament to about 13 percent of the federal budget, or equivalently to 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP. It is worth underlining, that the Truman administration resolved on the 1949-50 increase in military spending before the before the Korean War began. The Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade had already raised the sense of confrontation. Since the new commitment was only a tenth of the percentage level of World War II spending just a decade earlier, it seemed manageable. But Eisenhower had a point: the connections between the Pentagon and the American defense industry was to become a fixture and it was visible in board rooms and on golf courses across the county.

These trends notwithstanding, it is not primarily fiscal developments that reveal the supposed dangers of the deep state bureaucracy for Bannon and other Trump loyalists. American conservatives have long fought to limit the growth of government spending and to lighten administrative regulations. Sometimes resorting to plebiscitary referenda, they have imposed tax and borrowing ceilings at the state level, including a notable one in California. The supposed entity that Bannon and others attack as the deep state, however, is what most observers, left or right, recognize just as the state tout court or pure and simple, that is, a civil service or bureaucracy that administers legislation and ordinances according to constitutional provisions and legislation approved by elected assemblies and executives.

What makes it appear to Bannon as a hostile obstacle is not its size or prerogatives but the fact that courageous public officials have dared to resist Trump’s efforts to alter unfavorable electoral results, have opposed favorable tax rulings that would enrich his family’s wealth, or have stood in the way of his personal vendettas. In short, the supposed agents of the deep state are those trying to maintain the quaint idea of “a government of laws, not men.” It is the legal order that stands in the way of the President’s power to rule directly.

A government of laws, however, still depends upon men and women who interpret the laws. And in the final instance, America’s constitutional issues are being interpreted by a majority of nine Supreme Court justices, who to date have tended to confirm the president’s claims to represent the plenitude of executive power (the so-called theory of the unitary executive) and then to assert the scope of that power, whether by a majority of 7-2, 6-3, or 5-4. But if the Court can affirm the president’s power, the constitution gave congress power to organize the Supreme Court and the subsidiary federal courts. Faced with consistently hostile decisions in the 1930s from holdover Republican Party appointees, President Roosevelt contemplated enlarging the Supreme Court to secure a favorable majority (known as “court packing”). He backed off as he encountered hostile reactions and as the justices prudently tempered their opposition and delivered some favorable opinions. However, the possibility of Supreme Court reform, whether through term limits or enlargement may no longer be prove the taboo it was, and if a Democrat can win the presidency in 2028, court reform may well be on the agenda.

As historians look back on the recent phenomena of the Trump years, perhaps they may note the irony that just when Bannon and other MAGA loyalists denounced the deep state’s supposed resistance to the Trump program, the federal government was creating a more permeable state than had hitherto existed. Thus the DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency) program, announced as an intervention to reduce wasteful state agencies and turned over to Elon Musk, a citizen of South Africa, has bludgeoned public investment in education, research and other social programs, some of them taking a toll far beyond American borders. The Agency for International Development (AID), whose budget has been cut by plays a major public health role in the Third World.

It is thus not easy to apply a familiar historical or theoretical label to this vortex of private and public claims.. The German sociologist Max Weber developed the concepts of the patrimonial and bureaucratic state to describe types of rule. They remain general categories designed to comprehend a variety of historical and global institutions, and have been supplemented by the idea of neo-patrimonialism to suggest a regime bound formally by rules but operating in fact through the leader’s family and patronage networks.^[iv] Weber also outlined the sources of legitimate authority as well as the structures of rule. They included tradition, charisma, and the appeal to rationality. But how should these classifications serve us when narcissism, inconsistency and grandiose self-assessments enter into the mix? Trump’s authority, I believe, derives rather from a negative quality: his capacity to channel the resentments that had grown at what many Americans had come to see as a generation of enforced and excessive “political correctness.” The difficulty of classification impacts those protesting his regime as well. The mass demonstrations across the country that have taken place to protest Trump‘s administration have been organized as “No Kings” rallies, implies that monarchies can wield an authoritarian power that a presidential regime cannot, although the protesters doubtless recognize that constitutional monarchies exist in Britain and Scandinavia. Still, earlier notions of kingship endowed monarchy with arbitrary and even sacred power so that there has been an intuitive logic to the designation.

Americans alarmed by Trump’s grasp for power have sometimes viewed him as an aspiring fascist. We need to separate his own authoritarian impulses from the danger of his imposing a recognizably fascist regime. The MAGA movement is not a coherent fascist party; there has been no major lost war despite the ignominious withdrawals from Vietnam and a generation later from Afghanistan. Nor has the country experienced hyperinflation or mass unemployment such as destabilized Weimar Germany. Deindustrialization and pockets of persistent poverty,, on the other hand, has played an outsized role in Americans’ effort to process what often seemed their unaccustomed economic vulnerability. And although the Proud Boys and other would-be paramilitary corps have hardly matched the massive Nazi, stormtroopers, Trump encouraged their violent march on the legislature after he lost the 2020 election, and has fed them lurid scenarios of American carnage. The intertwining of American and Israeli political groups with strong and adversarial views on Middle East developments, coupled with campus protests since October 2023 has also contributed to the sense that vaunted American political stability might quickly prove fragile. An earlier confidence that “It can’t happen here,” -- to cite Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 scenario of a United States descent into a mélange of “good-ol’-boy” and modern totalitarian terror -- currently waits upon the results of the upcoming November congressional elections. In any case it raises the question: What exactly can’t happen here?

Which brings us to the possibility of an American fascism, perhaps the Left’s feverish counterpart to Bannon’s preoccupation with the Deep State. Debates about the nature of fascism have been vigorous in America ever since European scholars sought refuge in the 1930s and 1940s. For these émigré theorists intellectually formed by Marxist categories, suppression of labor unions and the Social Democratic Party seemed to key milestones in creating the Nazi system of rule. Contemporary American discussions of state theory and constitutionalism have focused far less on collective labor rights, which have weakened since the 1940s and 1950s in any case. Weimar’s constitutional order fractured fundamentally in 1930 over the collective role and claims of capital and labor in particular, but U.S. constitutional disputes have revolved around issues of race and the remedies that might be appropriate. Since the 1970s individual reproductive rights (abortion) have also been salient; and since President Trump’s first and second terms, issues of protected speech have flared again, aggravated now by the huge role of the internet. Current disputes during the Trump presidencies have also focused on the role and authority of the federal commissions whose members are appointed by the president but are confirmed and funded by Congress.

For the moment, with a Republican Congress unwilling to challenge the President’s claims of executive primacy, the battle in the courts claims attention. As with American law in general many of the issues are fought out in terms of arcane procedural arguments. Opposition to the president seek injunctions against his executive orders; while his Department of Justice lawyers petition for relief against the injunctions that are granted as the cases ascend slowly from lower-level courts to the Supreme Court.

The deep state in Steve Bannon’s sense has served disaffected Americans as a vivid and powerful metaphor. But it is also an analytically archaic concept. It reflects the fact that the American state has entered a particularly plasmic moment, subject to the new class cleavages created by the dizzying transformations of the digital age. The fateful institutional question is whether a meaningful constitutional state can survive the efforts of our Silicon Valley executives who believe themselves to possess extraordinary insight as a class and are wagering on ingratiating themselves with a President who also believes in his extraordinary capacity and his right to transform global and American politics. Who needs traditional fascism to enforce a regime that is so contemptuous of a legal order and dissolves the earlier distinctions of public power and private gains?

Charles S. Maier, August 2026

^[i] Stephen Skowronek, The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2025) p 3. See also Skowronek, Building a new American State: the Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

^[ii] Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” now in Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life: Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965 (The Library of America, 2020).

^[iii] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956, reprinted 2000).

^[iv] The term was used by Shmuel Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism (Sage, 1973), and has been applied since by Jean-François Médard, Nicholas van der Walle and many others.

Dr. Fauci’s ritual shaming and the vote by Rand Paul’s Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs vote to recommend that he be held in contempt of Congress should not surprise. It is the latest example of the would-be champions of vox populi humiliating and punishing those who seem to represent superior knowledge or wisdom. What makes the public ceremony possible, sadly, is that the scapegoats are revealed to indulge in a certain vanity; they have made themselves vulnerable by revealing that they have enjoyed celebrity status and they find it hard to hide their confidence of knowing they are smarter than their persecutors. Still, they pay a disproportionate price -- disgrace and legal punishment -- for this peccadillo, and for having rendered their country distinguished service.

In the long run, those who have enjoyed bullying them will become examples of shameful demagogy and perhaps sink into individual obscurity. Who outside the classicists remembers Socrates’ prosecutors and persecutors, Antyus and Meletus by name? It took Christopher Nolan’s recent film to revive the public memory of Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Committee who was instrumental in having Robert Oppenheimer stripped of his security clearance in 1954, thus denying him his major credential for further advisory work in 1954.

The Fauci hearings in fact recall the Oppenheimer hearings in 1953-54. Strauss had accumulated a long record of distinguished public service since the interwar period, but felt humiliated by Oppenheimer’s tendency to brush off his achievements, to reveal Strauss’s mediocre knowledge of nuclear physics, to allow himself a life style liberated from the earnest Jewish establishment credentials that Strauss took pride in, and to have close personal relationships with Soviet sympathizers even if he clearly rejected their efforts to persuade him to share the secrets of Los Alamos. And Oppenheimer had also sought to slow down the American response to the unexpectedly rapid Soviet success in developing its own fission bomb by racing to develop the far more powerful fusion weapon, the “super,” or hydrogen bomb. He thus offended the scientists, such as Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence, who wanted to demonstrate mastery of the technology, and he urged a policy wager that would have been very difficult for the Truman administration to accept in the cold war context of the 1950s.

Whether Oppenheimer urged restraint in the nuclear race because of his own stricken conscience is less clear. Nolan likes heroes anguished by the human costs of war but recall John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’ 2005/07 operatic treatment, Dr. Atomic, which totally neglected Oppenheimer’s later political travails to present him tormented as a Faustian challenger of nature as he prepared the July 16, 1945, test of the implosion mechanism that would be used in the “fat boy” over Nagasaki less than a month later. But the Adams-Sellars opera does not ask whether Oppenheimer was anguished by use of the “Little Boy” U235 weapon over Hiroshima.

Martin Agronsky’s 1965 CBS interview revealed a thoughtful Oppenheimer confronting moral issues that he tells us did not seem agonizing in 1945. He accepted then the assurances of the military that an invasion of Japan would have costs far higher for both sides; he did not seem to weigh the suggestion of a demonstration. Historians then and since have questioned whether or not the “demonstration” scenario could have credibly been played out -- there are reasons to be skeptical but also reasons to ask whether two bombs were needed in rapid succession -- but historians have not done so in an effort to destroy the reputation of the scientist involved.

In any case, it is the Oppenheimer scenario that comes to mind during the browbeating of Dr. Fauci, who was certainly not responsible for contributing to a devastating new military weapon. Rand Paul suggests that by not admitting that Chinese laboratories might have unleashed corona virus on the world, Dr. Fauci made the pandemic more devastating than it would otherwise have been.

The United States remains to date a formally democratic polity and at the same time a highly legalistic society. It has relied on the threat of enemies abroad and court decisions at home as well as on efficacious rituals of civic unity (including spectacular athletic competitions) to cope with its ideological and societal divisions. Observers and commentators disagree as to whether the country is fundamentally united or fundamentally divided; in the 1950s historians stressed an underlying consensus; there had arisen no serious fascist or communist challenge to the liberals’ “vital center.” By the mid 1960s that view seemed rather threadbare as Americans clashed over their baked-in institutions of white supremacy and a war that seemed unwinnable and ideologically flawed.

For better or worse, however, the conflicts do not lie along a simple right-left or conservative-liberal axis. Our institutions can be captured (at least for a while until reaction sets in) in all sorts of procedural ways -- the courts by claims of original intent or the respect due to precedent or by whatever doctrine can be given plausibility, and our elected bodies by the zealots who can silence a compliant majority. Socrates may have been a tutor to the Athenian jeunesse dorée who claimed he had a divine mission, but it was wrong to kill him. The men who lifted Oppenheimer’s security clearance could argue that they were not actively punishing him. In the same months of 1954, in the Army-McCarthy hearings a patrician lawyer was right to retort to Joseph McCarthy’s wheedling inquisitorial methods that even President Eisenhower would not rebuke: “You have done enough...have you no sense of decency?” Shouldn’t we ask Senator Rand Paul the same question: “Have you no sense of decency?”

I. Do you remember your elementary economics class where it was explained that there was a parallel between dollars and votes, and we all got to spend our dollars the way we all got to vote and by aggregating the dollars spent on a market basket of goods, we could establish a demand curve? James Buchanan, the public-choice economist, set out the argument formally in 1954 --in his article, “Individual Choice in Voting and the Market,” Journal of Political Economy, (62,4): 334-343 -- but it was probably a seductive sort of free-market folk wisdom far earlier. It seemed so when I took elementary economics as a college junior in 1958-59. Why did I not have the wit to pipe up: “But individuals each have one vote, while the number of dollars they possess can vary by up to millions”?

Indeed, the success of the analogy in the so-called “marketplace of ideas” -- the latter metaphor is in fact, a very similar disarming analogy -- provides a fine example of what Gramsci meant by “hegemony”: the attainment of class domination so complete that the language that expresses it is not even recognized as playing a key role in that domination. We live immersed in it like the fabled frogs who supposedly do not understand that they are in the pot designed to boil them.

The theorist who pointed out this situation most scathingly was probably Thurman Arnold in his book The Folklore of Capitalism (1937), an exposé of what he deemed the empty rhetoric of free competition that he wrote as a Yale Law School professor at a moment when what once was called the second New Deal was noisily embarking on a campaign to break up monopolies, which they blamed for the recurrence of recession in FDR’s second term. (The analysis complemented the models of “imperfect competition” published in 1933 by Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin, each of whom argued that oligopolies and monopolists could clear more profit by selling less at higher prices than by producing up to the classical market clearing point where marginal revenue equaled marginal cost.) Their “market power” shielded them from having to compete by cutting prices.

Instead of citing the old Ricardian bugaboo of a reserve army of the unemployed, the new generation of Keynesian economists effectively blamed mass unemployment on chronic under-production and under-investment-- which Keynes’s 1936 General Theory pointed out could be counteracted by government spending, Arnold’s reputation as a critic of outworn capitalist orthodoxy soon earned him an appointment to lead the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, where in fact, he vigorously began a campaign to enforce the antitrust legislation on the books since the Sherman Act of 1890.

This zeal did not last long, however. With the United States’ decision to aid Great Britain and even Soviet Russia in 1940-41, and then our own entry into the War at the end of 1941, the antitrust agenda soon gave way to the priorities of war production, government-industry cooperation in procurement, and the move from encouraging competitive pricing to agreed-on cost-plus contracts. (During World War I the government had effectively taken control of railroads and merchant shipping, but in the public’s name.) Thurman Arnold left for a seat on the D.C. Second Circuit Court of Appeals and ultimately a Law School deanship. Nonetheless, one of the lingering antitrust cases originated in the 1930s, an attempt to prosecute ALCOA for restraint of trade was left for the government’s was finally decided under Judge learned Hand in the New York Circuit Court in 1945, who ruled that monopolies did not have to pursue policies that explicitly sought to freeze out competitors to violate the law: commanding market share in itself qualified them for break-up. By the time the case played out, however, new entrants into the aluminum ingot market had weakened the case. The next spasm of anti-monopoly activity came thirty years later with the government’s break-up of AT&T into separate units for phone equipment production (GTE) and network transmission (Baby Bells). Recall the comedienne Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the telephone operator (on “Saturday Night Live” from, 1969 into the 1970s) at the switchboard blithely rerouting calls: “We can do what we want; we’re the telephone company.”

II. Remedies under antitrust legislation provide consumers with palliative care. They certainly should not be despised; we had cheaper airline ticket prices and more flight choices after the Carter administration deregulated airline ticket prices in 1978. Given America’s underlying commitment to the sanctity of property rights, periodic crusades against alleged monopolists remained the state’s wedge to set limits to economic power. They also diverted from more radical proposals for government takeovers and helped structure political coalitions. Alexander Hamilton’s program to advance the country’s economic development through federal government intervention, including tariffs, a failed effort to establish a national development company, and a more successful restoration of national finances and establishment of a national bank, has earned our generation’s admiration, thanks also in part to Lin Lee Miranda’s musical.

Yet Hamilton’s overall vision of a strong mercantile state has always aroused vehement opposition, early on from Jeffersonian agrarians, then Jacksonian Democrats -- who vetoed renewal of the Bank of the United States -- and Southern slaveholders, and later from soft-money Free Silverites, a new wave of Populist Party organizers, and by the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Somc of their animus veered off into quasi-paranoia: sample Ezra Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Trying to find coherence in their platforms (outside the outright defenders of slavery and later segregation) is also of limited benefit, since in contrast to the Hamiltonians, their platforms were often discarded. The Hamiltonians remained a more purposeful coalition. Reorganized anew within the Republican Party of the 1850s, their platform promised containment of slavery, a protective tariff, and access to “free” land in the West by a homestead act -- and they more than delivered.

Still, the galvanizing denunciation of monopoly has continually recurred. A broad cross-party coalition passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. In 1903 the Northern Securities case became the first major exercise of the new policy; in 1911 the Supreme Court decreed the breakup of Standard Oil. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) stressed activist regulation more than trust-busting as a remedy, but his administration initiated significant antitrust actions that bore fruit under his successor William Howard Taft. Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” campaign of 1912, which caried that year’s election, stressed the evils of monopolies, and his administration passed the Clayton antitrust act of 1914, to tighten up loopholes. Now we are seeing another wave of anti-monopoly fervor directed at META (Facebook) and Twitter. It is clear that Donald Trump is not going to play Thurman Arnold, or the fabled “trust buster” and third-party Progressive candidate in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt, even if the President would like to have a space for his own face on the granite next to TR. If Lily Tomlin could be persuaded to resume her comedic talent, perhaps she could play Sheryl Sandberg instead of ATT&T’s Ernestine.

III. But today’s issues are about more than restraint of trade or competitive pricing. They are also crucially about content and public diffusion. Congress has famously exempted internet providers from liability, criminal or civil, for the content they carry. Print media and public have been protected, not by legislation but according to the degree that the courts find that the constitutional guarantees of the First Amendment are applicable. When radio became widespread after World War I, the government claimed that it had a proprietary claim on “spectrum space,” a new sovereign domain that it might partition and distribute or auction off by wavelength or frequency. It also set up a regulatory authority, which it later extended to cover television as well, that claimed to enforce rules to preserve parity or fairness for established currents of opinion. Thus, public struggles today are not only about the right to establish new channels of communication, most of which in the U.S remain private concerns that enjoy public immunities. Today’s concerns are also akin to earlier preoccupations about unwelcome content, whether political (sedition), libelous (defamation), or otherwise transgressive (obscene, age-inappropriate, personally abusive, or threatening, etc.). But it is precisely the internet’s capacity for mass communication that makes these issues so contentious.

The phone company, after all, provided facilities needed for person-to-person communication. So far as I know, no public authority has managed or sought to prohibit, for instance, phone sex between consenting adults although it has released or alluded to sexting transcripts it has gathered, presumably to discredit opponents who are in its sights. It is a safe bet that the FBI or other security agencies are trying to keep track of planning for demonstrations and protests. So far the common carriers themselves have not been prosecuted for hosting such communication although it seems a safe bet that the Trump administration would like to do so. Until very recently the internet provides access to services which, subject to restrictions on age and offerings involving bodily harm, any user has been able to send or receive no matter how scurrilous, libelous, or raunchy.

Although the parallel with freedom of the press sometimes seems intuitive, other public media have long been different. Control of content can involve government efforts to prosecute obscenity, “sedition” and “libel.” Sedition is an effort to undermine and discredit lawful government that goes beyond mere opposition. It has had an uneven career in Anglo-American courts. Even when a sedition act was legislated under the Federalist administration of John Adams it granted immunity to members of Congress and was abandoned once the Jeffersonians came to power. How sedition charges were to be squared with the First Amendment was unclear although exceptions were made for wartime prosecutions. The Lincoln administration’s effort to prosecute an anti-draft publisher during the Civil War would be reversed after the war ended. But even such a liberal justice as Felix Frankfurter upheld a state law in 1943 that required students’ pledging allegiance to the flag. It collided with the Jehovah Witness’s claim that it violated their religious conscience as well as other protections supposedly provided by the First Amendment.

Establishing liability (with fines or contempt proceedings) for defamation (which included slander and libel, i.e. written defamation) has provided an alternative way to inhibit opposition to the state as well as a recourse for private actors. But even before the celebrated case of John Peter Zenger in 1740, British courts had begun accepting that the state could not simply crack down on unwelcome opposition. Falsehood and/or defamation had to be involved. The limits of liability for defamation in the U.S. remain in some uncertainty. Will the expansive protection from libel prosecutions that the press has enjoyed since Sullivan v. The New York Times (1971), which essentially limited liability for any public figure to the reckless and malicious (i.e. willful and knowing) publication of false information, remain unconstrained?

Thus several clusters of issues are currently st stake: the traditional criteria for monopoly and restraint of trade, all the more sensitive when issues of political balance are concerned, including the power of internet providers to buy up ancillary services (Warner Bros.) or other providers is one; possible control of content and immunity from liability are others. Who can grant or change these terms -- the president or congress or department of justice? Ultimately five or six members of the Supreme Court will structure our domain of communicative action, indeed the dimensions of the public sphere, to appropriate Habermas’s terms, at least for a finite period. Defining what is public and what is private has always been the question préalable for liberal and constitutional politics. But can we presuppose that such a demarcation is possible, or historically was ever really possible? Why we ask that question in the Trump era is easy to answer; how to answer it is not.

Charles S. Maier, July 20, 2026

"The past is Prologue," states the granite plinth at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the National Archives in Washington. But in today's world it is the future that is becoming prologue to the present. More and more of our lives, individually, and collectively, are based on expectations; more precisely on stochastic modeling of expectations -- that is wagers on a range of probability percentages. Animals have temporal expectations, hard-wired as it were, but as a certainty. The squirrel gathers and buries acorns for the winter; birds migrate south and north -- but these activities probably seize them as a present compulsion, not as a calculation of the changes ahead, although to be fair to them I haven't informed myself of possible experiments that might be discriminating between their awareness of the future needs and present compulsion, such as placing the same species in an environment of unchanging temperature and daylight.

Certainly, though, it is our fate as conscious beings to be aware of uncertainty, and over the past three hundred years or so mathematicians and scientists have developed the tools to quantify possible outcomes. Adam Smith said that it was in our human nature to "truck and barter" -- to buy, sell, and exchange. He did not name gambling as such, but his whole tract presupposed that exchanges were motivated not only by consumption needs, but by the prospect of a subsequent exchange that might yield a profit; hence it involved a wager. Stock exchanges and insurance markets flourished in Amsterdam, London and then in many commercial centers despite disastrous crashes.

It is good taste today among knowledgeable commentators to distinguish between "risk," or the subset of uncertainties to which probabilities can be assigned, and uncertainty in general. Being a rather risk-averse individual, I've never been able to instinctively preserve the clear break. It's somewhat akin to former Defense Secretary McNamara's distinction between the "known unknowns" and the "unknown unknowns." But all of those form part of "the fog of war." And by extension the fog of living in time.

It is apparent that contemporary life has vastly expanded the public discussion of risk or probabilistic outcomes. Part of this derives from the massive "financialization" of the economy (another name for its opening to instruments of risk including "derivatives," or wagers on the outcome of wagers, whether on individual stocks or on aggregate indices). Futures trading in commodities -- that is guarantees of a future price or delivery -- was a venerable activity. Mediterranean grain traders in Antiquity bought and sold "futures"; the Japanese established a rice exchange in 1730; the Chicago Board of Trade was established in 1845. In the 1970s futures trading in foreign currencies, government bonds, interest rates and stock market indices surged ahead, and most recently crypto has lured the risk-enthusiastic.

Confronting uncertainty, central bankers vary in their strategies. The United States has just installed Kevin Warsh, who seems far more reluctant to provide so-called "forward guidance" than his predecessor. Paul Tucker, a practitioner of great experience at the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements, has contributed a major treatise, Global Discord (Princeton UP, 2022) on the tensions produced in the contemporary effort to manage international economic stability in a world of divergent national interests.

Of course, the international financial system is not the only sphere where probabilistic reasoning has taken on a new glamor. Global health and disease is perhaps the other salient arena, in part because of the recent progress of biologics -- and sadly because of the reappearance of devastating infectious diseases. The COVID pandemic, 2020-22 was the counterpart for the world of health of the financial crisis of 2008-12. The proliferation of Chat GPT with its "large language models" and AI and related applications to the sphere of communication and knowledge techniques reveals related impulses.

But my sense of future collapse or future telescoping is intended to suggest a deeper change than our heightened recourse to stochastic outcomes. Viewed systemically, I believe, these trends tend to collapse our firm sequencing of past, present, and future. If we have long been accustomed to examining the past to understand the present (although often far too simplistically, and with too easy a faith in the techniques of analogies to help in that process), we are less used to thinking of possible futures as currently present. We can't really keep the future at bay any longer. That awareness, however, is lurking ever more tangibly even though it arrives as a probabilistic exercise. Perhaps a premonitory symptom might have emerged a century ago with the formulations of quantum physics and their strange findings of superposition. But now it is our turn to be Schrödinger's cat.

CSM 6/19/2026

What does it mean for society when the super wealthy are getting ever wealthier both in absolute and in relative terms? I have been pondering the Sunday New York Times June 14 report by Patricia Cohen ("Billionaires' Billions are Increasing Faster than Ever"). The segment of the world's population she highlights is no longer the top decile, or the top one percent, but the top one ten thousandth percent of the top one percent -- or the top one millionth of the population (10^-6) --if I am keeping track correctly of her exponents. Her numbers are a bit confusing. The tycoons' wealth is measured as a share not of global wealth but of global GDP, and since wealth is a measure of accumulation, and income is a measure of flow, wealth statistics will tend to yield a greater degree of inequality in periods of general economic growth. The world's poor obviously must have some income to survive but need not have wealth beyond the minimum of food and shelter. In either case, however, super earners and super accumulators are claiming an ever-greater share, In the mid 1990s the top millionth of global world wealth holders held fortunes amounting to about 6% of global income and today they have reached about 17 percent.

Is this a problem for democratic politics? Or is it just a fact of life, comparable perhaps to the fact that the universe is apparently not only expanding but expanding at an ever-faster rate? Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. allegedly dismissed Charles Beard's 1913 Economic Basis of the Constitution with the remark that he didn't need Beard to tell him that wealthy men wrote the Constitution. Of course, Holmes had one ninth of the votes to decide on the constitutionality of many contentious issues of the day, but this legal power did not let him save much of the reform labor legislation that a majority of his fellow justices routinely vetoed for the first third of the twentieth century.

The framers of the Constitution understood that economic inequality must have an impact on political decisions, and they largely wanted it that way. Leaving aside the glaring issue of slavery how did disparities of wealth impact institutions? The history of the Roman Republic and of the country, Great Britain, which had ruled the colonies before the American revolution, provided the go-to accounts of the institutions that would be challenging to preserve. (A sad personal note here: the tragic death on June 7 of Gordon Wood, a preeminent historian of early America, an early colleague of mine some 60 years ago and one of the continuing intellectual interlocutors of my late wife Pauline Maier has sent me back to the related historical debates.). A republic required representation, not of the propertyless but of independent male adults; it also required a counterweight to prevent degeneration if the majority attempted radical confiscatory policies. An executive might serve that function to a degree, but it could also become abusively populist. A senate, elected on a more restrictive franchise, was intended to serve as a wise restraint.

The great political debates in Europe and America throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century concerned this precarious equilibrium. Tocqueville came to believe that their decentralized political assemblies and habits formed by voluntary associations allowed the Americans to avoid the extremes that beset France. The new intellectual discipline of sociology would emerge in part as a response to the tensions that could never be fully resolved, as analysis allegedly replaced normative prescription for William Graham Sumner, Auguste Compte, Hyppolite Taine, Max Weber, and others. The public role of religion, the limits of the franchise, colonial and military policies, the role of prescribed languages in multilingual federations such as Austria-Hungary and later Canada, and the budget (hence taxes and military and social expenditures) became the battlegrounds for emerging parties.

The German sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid (Staatsozialismus oder Staatskapitalismus, 1917) and then Joseph Schumpeter (Crisis of the Tax State, 1918) developed the analysis of what they termed fiscal sociology, which focused on conflicts over the national budget as the key to modern politics. The tendency of modern budgets to claim larger shares of national economic output has been a major phenomenon of modern development. It is not easy to measure. In Scandinavia and Germany budget shares rose to perhaps 55-60 percent of GDP; in the U.S. and Japan they have remained perhaps 30-40 percent. But comparison is tricky: much of the cost of higher education remains as a family burden in the U.S., whereas tuition is largely free in Europe. But if one sums up the three levels of government in the United States, public expenditures are more comparable. The rising levels have not been monotonic; the world wars led public expenditures to rise to 50% and over (perhaps to 60-70 percent in Germany and Russia during World War II). They then fell back although interest payments continued high only to climb again in the 1960s -- this time without the spur of a major war.

Let us pause over public borrowing and interest burdens since these numbers often generate alarm. Interest payments to domestic bondholders are a transfer payment from those who don't hold bonds or gilts to those who do -- regressive, but not a diminution of national income. What does it really mean to defer the costs of borrowing onto the next generation? The expression has often been used with respect to wartime expenses. But the real current costs of a war in terms of manpower and materiel must be met while a war is being fought. One cannot draft the unborn for the armed forces of today. One can defer renewing equipment until after the war and postpone peaceful applications of innovation, as the mass television was largely put on ice in World War II. What societies do in war if they cannot conquer productive resources abroad, as the Germans managed for much of World War II, including about 6 million workers drafted from defeated from abroad, is to shake loose the savings of those at home. This has been accomplished either through voluntary savings or disguised levies -- selling long-term war bonds that will erode in real value -- or compelling central banks to print money and thus silently divert private purchasing power to the state through inflation. As Keynes wrote in his 1940 tract, How to Pay for the War, inflation is the easiest way politically; it is not voted on, and the cost of the levy can be concealed by price controls or revealed only later (as has been now occurring in the U.S. under President Trump).

The current alarm over social security is one of our own choosing. New Deal policy makers opted in the 1930s to fund social security from its own budget so it could be sold as a form of institutionally guided individual savings, co-financed by employers and employees. Essentially it is a disguised pipeline that takes income from those currently working to pay for those no longer in the labor market. The French fixate on retaining an early retirement age; we fixate on the shielding of income and on the appreciation of assets. All are political decisions; each is obviously politically charged. Retirement ages might be differentiated so that, for instance, jobs involving physical labor qualify for retirement earlier than office work. We could raise the ceiling of the income currently taxable for social security; we could allocate a portion of a steeper progressive income tax to retirement pensions. Or we could in theory levy a wealth tax, which at low rates becomes essentially a tax on the income from financial assets. Since much of our philanthropic, medical, and educational activity is premised on tax entitlements, a wealth tax would admittedly require a major restructuring of their support. But society in aggregate does provide for their maintenance now, and over time could provide for alternative financing. It has already done so massively since, say, the Cold War.

The meaning of property has always been contested. The invention of the corporation and the trust were momentous conceptual advances that may have encouraged progressive economic advances but certainly provided a mystique that enhanced the social and political power of those who utilized these structures. Most of us see our earnings as compensation for our individual efforts. What we have not spent in our lifetimes we should be able to give to our heirs. Other countries have protected that right differentially according to the degree of relationships: a child gets more than a distant cousin. But the premise of American public finance is that the individual is or has been the source of income and wealth.

What is being implicitly debated today is not just the distribution of income and wealth but claims to distinction. The individuals who have helped to steer the admittedly massive transition into the digital era, whether as inventors, organizers of innovation, or clever financiers, believe with some justification that they have brought about a great increase in the wealth of society -- even allowing for all the costs of the transition for those who have been or will be displaced. But it is also the inherited structures of learning and government to which many others have contributed as well that have provided the framework for current socio-technological advance.

The princes of the digital era, moreover, are claiming great political deference as well as inordinate wealth. Deference is not quite power, but the compatibility of deference and democracy have been debated since the late eighteenth century. What rewards should deference bring with it besides distinction? Are democracy and deference in contradiction, or does democracy require deference to contain its passions either for levelling or for Caesarism? Gordon Wood discussed all these debates as they arose in the early American republic. It may be time to revisit them, for I believe they have become relevant again.

June 15, 2026

There are few things that make me feel more inadequate than to read the predictions of global trends in Foreign Affairs, or similar media outlets-- my current favorite is Le Grand Continent, steeped as it is in quasi-Schmittian Realpolitik -- and having just finished a bunch of them, I feel more sprachlos than usual. The authors seem so confident that they can summarize the past and offer possible scenarios for the future based on comparative economic stats -- GDP and what we used to call balance of payments with its current account components, investment trends, domestic and foreign debt -- then, too, on the indices of comparative military strength, including the latest hypersonic weapons or perhaps cruise missiles --Tomahawks, Rafaels,, Zvezdas, Iskanders, etc. -- or short and medium range Shaheen, Shahed and Shahab missiles vis-a-vis Patriots. Pershngs, etc. I am not a missile maven and I struggle to keep them straight. And in general I feel ill-equipped to assimilate the onrush of events, to keep my bearings against the headwinds of global change.

Of course, the forecasters hedge their bets, but still, their purpose seems to be either to terrify us with China’s prowess, or to reassure us that the US still holds vital cards -- universities, allies, arsenals, inventive spark -- and that American moxie can still prevail in our lifetimes if not in saecula seculorum. So which is it? Are the Chinese going to clean our clocks? Are we still the indispensable nation? Can we pull up our socks? Will we succumb to the Thucydidean Trap on the way down and strike out at the robust challenger? Will Ferguson’s Law prevail --namely that when a country’s interest burden exceeds its military spending, it’s in a downward geopolitical spiral? In my mind’s ear I hear the last slowly chirping crickets of America’s late waning summer. Or have the Chinese overreached: sunk too many resources into empty concrete apartment towers and scattered Belt and Road installations that will be more a burden than an asset? Or perhaps, just maybe, we can reach an accommodation: share the world between us or at least goose the Europeans to leave their retirement from Weltpolitik and share the burden of defending the West.

I am not impugning the brain power of the commentators, above all since I sense the flagging of my own, which in truth was meant for a quiet rumination on the past and not for calculating odds. I know several personally as close friends and have been privileged to teach with them or at least to listen to their ideas and be treated as a partner. I often wish that I had written their most recent column. But I’m mindful that analogy can run into problems. John Stuart Mill warned us already about them in A System of Logic. “Like,” “analogous,” and “parallel” too often serve as the end of analysis as well as a beginning.

Instant history tempts, and it can be intoxicating: relive the parabolas of empire -- Athenian, Roman, Spanish/Habsburg, French, German, Han and Qing, Dutch, and British -- and recall their melancholy decline. Should we rush to biological metaphors with their life-cycles or perhaps, more plausibly and comprehensively think in terms of entropy and Newton’s Second Law. Or perhaps just insist that history is a record of the unforeseen, of predictions that sooner or later must be falsified or at least amended; similarly an account of policies that inflict collateral damage; of scientific models that are incomplete, and vantage points that are always partial.

So why bother studying history? This is a question I have been asking myself after many years of doing it. For the spectacle? For the psychological equivalent of self-flagellation? But I don’t really believe that. For the satisfaction of participating and observing at the same time -- being inside and outside simultaneously, part of a larger system even as I attempt to understand its encompassing “structures?” Or because it’s there. And because I’ve been privileged or cursed, as the Chinese proverb allegedly had it, to live in interesting time. Human societies -- do we not all sense it? -- are shifting in profound ways. Perhaps they will settle back into familiar frameworks, perhaps not. But for now the ground is trembling underfoot.

Making an Offer You Can't Accept: The Art of Onus Shifting

The "Godfather" movies made famous the idea of a Mafia offer one couldn't refuse. But for a state it is just as important to be able to make an offer one cannot accept so it can demonstrate supposed good faith that has been rejected by the other side. Sometimes the exercise is called onus shifting; in legal procedures it can mean shifting the burden of proof. Few countries declare a war or enter an ongoing one without protesting their defensive intentions. Imperial powers claim the need to discipline or subjugate barbarian tribes raising trouble just outside their frontiers. Modern states work to demonstrate the responsibility of their adversaries.

In the broader arena of world politics, the objective is to demonstrate to global public opinion, international bodies, and perhaps most important, to a state's own citizenry that there was no conscionable alternative to forcing the showdown it felt obliged to pursue. Consider some examples. The British government had negotiated a decade of military agreements with France for common action in the case of a possible war with Germany as of 1914; still no formal alliance existed and the Liberal cabinet was concerned that significant opposition might emerge to entering an impending war on the side of France. German plans for a possible two-front war required a rapid advance through Belgium. Britain's 1839 commitment as a guarantor of the treaty establishing an independent and neutral Belgium facilitated parliament’s declaration of war on Germany. To the German ambassador in London, Britain was going to war for "a scrap of paper." The scrap of paper hardly determined the Anglo-French entente, but it helped justify its response.

In the case of the United States, defense of its rights as a neutral to trade with one or both of the warring parties was key to intervention in 1812 in the long clash between Britain and France after 1792, then again in 1917 in the war between Germany and its Franco-British enemies on the Western Front. The right to trade as a neutral soon merged with the right to defend its citizens' property abroad that would justify interventions in the Americas and the Middle East. The story of those interventions, in the interwar and post-World War II years becomes the story of American empire, whether "empire for liberty" or empire for profits and property, or for faith or influence, or for the self-confirmation of an elite, or in the best case out of despair at unchecked despotism abroad. Each requires its own narrative. Here I am interested in the process of justification as exemplified in the run-up to U.S. participation in World War II.

Franklin Roosevelt was a master of onus shifting even as he insisted the US wanted to remain neutral in the great conflicts brewing in the 1930s as he sought simultaneously to defend democracy from the advance of fascism. By the summer of 1940 that meant defending Britain. Did he believe that he could adequately preserve Britain from Nazi conquest in 1940 with just the amendment of the neutrality acts enacted earlier by an isolationist Congress? Once the danger of direct German invasion seemed averted, Britain faced the peril of the U-Boat campaign that threatened shut off needed imports. By the spring of 1941 FDR secured the passage of Lend Lease. FDR was committed to helping Britain survive but insisted that the U.S. could do so without formally entering the war. Did he really believe this or was he just trying to edge into the war without a backlash from isolationist opinion? Was the commitment to use American destroyers to escort supplies halfway to Britain designed to provoke the Germans into recapitulating the unrestricted submarine warfare of World War I that had led to U.S. intervention in 1917. Hitler, in any case, seemed determined to resist that dénouement until the U.S. found itself at war with Japan and defending possessions in the Pacific.

When Japan annexed Manchuria in 1931-32, the Roosevelt administration had contented itself with Secretary of State Henry Stimson's announcement that it would recognize no changes brought about by force to existing treaties and territories. The further Japanese invasion of China that followed in 1937 showed the insufficiency of this response. The Japanese occupation of French Indochina after France had effectively surrendered to Germany in the summer of 1940 led President Roosevelt to demand by mid 1941 that the Japanese relinquish their control, not only of Indochina, but, at the behest of the Chinese government based now in the interior, areas that the Japanese were occupying in China. At the same time, his military advisers counselled restraint in threatening the Japanese. American naval resources were required to sustain escort operations in supplying Britain.

Understanding the dependence oi the Japanese Navy on access to oil, the Americans decided to block Japan's access to American petroleum supplies. By this point the Japanese government was too deeply committed to its position to yield. The Americans would not accept the Japanese proposal for a temporary but renewable modus vivendi that would have allowed Tokyo to keep its forces in place. This left Japan with the option of war with America, or an ignominious climb-down from its gains in China and Indochina. Intercepted and decoded Japanese cable traffic made Americans aware that Japan was likely to make a further move, but where and when remained cloudy. Choosing war required the conquest of oil-rich Dutch Indonesia, British-held Singapore, and additionally, so Tokyo calculated, preemptive attacks on American bases in the Philippines and as far west as Hawaii and Guam. It was a fateful decision; rationalized only by arguing that a quick removal of American naval power in the Western Pacific would allow time to stabilize a wider defense perimeter. Out of some fateful lethargy or effort not to provoke Tokyo, America's Pacific fleet was left anchored and vulnerable at its Hawaiian base.

In their different ways, the enlargement of the second world war followed from offers that could not be accepted. Certainly, the Japanese decision was irrational from a longer-term perspective. The military potential of the Americans remained far greater even if the US was sadly deficient in B-17 bombers and other weapons. The US had far greater shipyard facilities, ample oil, and a far larger industrial base. Tokyo wagered on shock and awe in the short-term. and the hope that the Americans would eventually weary of their commitment in East Asia. Instead, President Roosevelt could easily rouse the country to strike back against "a day that will live in infamy," and lead Americans to believe there could be no choice but to enter the war. That very decision impelled Hitler finally to allow his admirals to have their declaration of war so they might confront the American undeclared war in the North Atlantic.

Military historians have written about the American way of war. They refer to the sparing commitment of ground forces in favor of industrial and technological supremacy. But there is equally an American way of getting into war --not so different from that of other combatants: the protestations of innocence, the discovery that preexisting conditions compel an American response, the simultaneous efforts to negotiate and to threaten, the conviction that the other side ultimately bears the responsibility for the conflict. There is a cost. To return to the late 1930s, the Japanese government and its military behaved badly whether out of brutality or helplessness. They had already gone on a murderous rampage when they took Nanjing in 1937. They were committed to conquest, as was Hitler's Germany, which by late 1941 effectively controlled continental Europe deep into Russia and required over three years to dislodge during which it massacred millions of non-combatants, including in particular all the Jews and Roma it could lay its hands on.

Coherent American foreign policy requires cooperation between branches of government that the founders envisaged as counterweights. Our constitution stipulates the congressional right to declare war, but one may question whether the choice of war or peace has been a responsibility Congress is anxious to assume. Indeterminacy may be the best institutional balance that can be achieved. Today's critics may justifiably want Congress to control or at least take some responsibility for reining in the Trump family's ventures in diplomacy. Congressional oversight may also promise to end the "endless wars" that critics denounce, but recall that a few decades ago, concerned liberals were defending the duty to intervene where gross human rights violations were taking place.

We face some strikingly familiar dilemmas with respect to Iran. It is a far lesser power than was imperial Japan. But the possession of nuclear arms -- even if not yet by Iran itself -- introduces stakes that have transformed international politics in the period since 1945. Non-Maga politicians and pundits worry about the President’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, even when they would still prefer to keep enrichment below weapons capability. Are we to go to war or not? Are we prepared to escort others' vessels through the Straits of Hormuz, as we escorted supply ships to Britain halfway across the Atlantic? And if we are attacked how should we respond? Who would not prefer a Tehran regime that was more tolerant and less repressive, but who believes that this would be the consequence of a direct attack on the current Iranian government? And let us be frank, if even that development could be brought about, would those of us who believe that the Trump regime is dangerous and degrading at home be happy crediting the President with that achievement? Here we are again, confronting calculations that resist calculation -- and perhaps with the present administration apparently not even searching for whatever guidance it might find in the past, no matter how indeterminate that guidance must remain. For all our sense of fulfillment from being the "indispensable nation," would it not be best if we were less indispensable and that other coalitions weighed in as well?

Charles S. Maier

May 14, 2026

The jockeying over the Hormuz Strait continues as I write this note about the crisis that led the United States to abandon neutrality in April 1917 and enter the World War, almost three years ongoing, on the side of the British and French and against Germany. President Wilson came to conceive of his intervention grandly as a war to end war -- more on that below -- but it followed months of debate over how to deal with German submarine warfare. The U-Boat armed with torpedoes emerged as a qualitatively new military technology in the early twentieth century after early rudimentary efforts from the American civil war onward. The German strategists, above all the Naval command -- but soon to be supported by the army leadership whose influence over German policy grew decisively during the war -- envisaged the U-Boat as a weapon for enforcing a total blockade that would compel surrender of their island adversary, Great Britain, which depended on continuing supply, most conspicuously the foodstuffs it imported from North America. And not only wheat, but cotton, copper, and paper that were proving indispensable in different ways for waging modern war.

Take the issue first on its own explicit terms. In the efforts to codify laws of war the major European powers had debated and negotiated restrictions on naval blockade since the late eighteenth century. "Close" blockades were acceptable outside the port cities of an enemy but not broader interdictions on the high seas; they might target military contraband but not civilian supplies. American maritime interests had originally clashed with declared British imperatives during the latter's wars against revolutionary France and then Napoleon. The fledgling U.S. had entered war with Britain in 1812 in part to assert its commercial rights as a neutral; by half a century later the British thought it best to smooth over clashes that had arisen when London contested Washington's right to blockade the secessionist Confederacy.

In 1909 the British had led an effort to codify the then accepted rules, which produced the Declaration of London -- unratified but generally accepted before the 1914 war -- that allowed considerable freedom for neutral trade including the right to allow cotton and copper and paper to qualify as non-contraband goods, exemptions granted to secure American adherence. In late August 1914, almost a month into the massive new war in Europe, the British decided that they could no longer abide by this permissive regime of maritime rights for neutrals. Happily for London, Washington accepted Britain's decision to enforce tighter rules.

By 1915 the Germans, who had failed to win the decisive early victory on the Western Front that their military planners had counted on, turned to the U-Boat and announced they would feel free to destroy neutral as well as Allied cargoes that entered a broad zone around to the British Isles. At this point technological factors entered to inflame the confrontation. The crude proto types that had emerged during the American Civil War had developed into usable new weapons that had to surface periodically to recharge their diesel-electric motors but could still lurk underwater for long hours. International agreement stipulated that a submarine enforcing the blockade should first visit and search and then instruct the crew of its intended prey to take to their lifeboats before their vessel was sunk. But once it surfaced, the submarine was too vulnerable even to lightly armed freighters to observe these niceties. Hence the Germans depended on the general announcement of prohibited ocean zone to acquit its obligations to neutrals. Among the ships that fell victim to the 1915 U-Boat offensive was the British "Lusitania," which managed to offload 700 passengers in the 18 minutes before it sank, but could not save another 1200, including 128 Americans.

Predictable outrage followed, but Wilson decided to limit American reaction to a warning that the U.S. would demand "strict accountability" for any further loss of American lives. Wilson's threats and further proposals appeared feckless to pro-British activists. Although the German government temporarily seemed to back off, after unsuccessful attempts by the U.S. to win mutual pledges for a modus vivendi from the combattants -- the British to relax their blockade at sea; the Germans to abandon attacks on neutral shipping without warning -- attacks resumed in April 1916, and the Germans had sunk a group of liners, most notably the cross-channel steamer, Sussex. Wilson went to Congress and threatened to sever relations. The Germans pledged to refrain and attacks again halted. But not for long.

1916 brought two long, massive, and indecisive bloodlettings on the Western Front: the British attack on the Somme and thereafter the French defense of Verdun. On both sides, the early wartime suspension of overt domestic political activity began to break down: the Left looked toward compromise peace; the Right demanded a more resolute prosecution on the battlefield. The space for a compromise peace, however, was very narrow. German nationalists and the Supreme Command, personified by Generals Paul Hindenburg and Eeric Ludendorff, refused to allow a pledge to liberate Belgium, whose invitation had originally justified (though not actually motivated) London's entering the war on the side of France. French nationalists hoped for the recovery of Lorraine if not Alsace, both lost to Germany n 1870-71. How could the leaders of the Allies face public opinion if the 1914 status quo were simply restored?

Comparable arguments dominated in German government and military circles. The military leaders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, demanded anew that the U-Boat be deployed once again to force Britain to yield, and at the end of 1916, the informal Reichstag coalition that had applied some counter-pressure collapsed as the Catholic Center Party yielded to the Generals' demands. In January 1917, unrestricted submarine warfare was authorized once again and provided Wilson the justification for entering the war in April-- now with the mission to produce an almost messianic peace. He was handed a further justification: the clumsy proposal by German Foreign Office officials to the Mexicans that they might regain territory earlier lost to the United States in the previous century if they joined in an attack on a mutual foe.

The masterly historian of American foreign relations, Ernest May followed both international negotiations and domestic constraints in Germany, Britain, and the U.S. in his early book The World War and American Isolation, 1914-1917 (Harvard University Press, 1959). But still concerned with the critical revisionist and isolationist accounts written with an eye on the politics of the 1930s, May structured his account to argue that Wilson had no real realistic alternative. For a recent implicit counter-narrative see Philip Zelikow, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 (PublicAffairs, Hachette, 2021).

When I first studied these issues in 1959-60, however, the controversy over the ostensible controversy had given way to a debate over the internal political stakes of the war: My then teacher, Arno Mayer (briefly at Harvard before settling down at Princeton in 1961) was arguing that the international issues were subordinate to transnational ideological conflicts: on both sides the old order dominated by traditional landed and newer industrial elites were confronting two alternate challenges: the Wilsonian democratic and social democratic reformists and the Leninist Bolshevik radicals. (See originally Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (Yale, 1959), reissued by Knopf in 1967 as Wilson versus Lenin and its sequel, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (Knopf, 1967). This was already an interpretation advanced by critical German and American historians, linked by marriage, moreover, to Charles Beard, who had critiqued the material interests behind ratification of the American constitution.

Was the issue of neutral rights in which Wilson tacked between Britain and Germany, or alternatively, was destined to align the U.S. with England and to overtake it as a global hegemon, only a screen for underlying ideological clashes -- what German historians would call "the primacy of domestic policy"? That would be too simple. I believe that the ostensible causes of American intervention are better described as "wedge issues": genuine in their own right but also freighted with huge domestic stakes that had the potential to countries apart if fully acknowledged. Serious policy choices ae usually wedge issues: they entail the full spectrum of alternative national identities. The historian should analyze them as such.

It took over another year and a half for the war to end, including two revolutions in Russia , another series of huge battles in the West, the deploying of a million American troops in France by spring and summer 1918, and finally the collapse of the Austrian and German fronts until the guns fell silent in November. American battlefield deaths cost only 100,000 soldiers as against, say, the Germans' 1.8 milllions or the French 1.5 milllions. But during the summer and early fall of 1918, the U.S. casualty rate climbed to the sanguinary heights of the other countries fighting on the European continent. Nor was it the trench war narrowly speaking that inflicted these tolls: Death rates had in fact stabilized once soldiers dug in late 1914; it was the periodic reversion to a war of mass attacks that piled up the most corpses. But even after the armistice took hold, it was only the formal battles that ceased. Four continental empires -- Russian, German, Austrian, and Ottoman -- had disintegrated, but civil wars and sporadic and ruthless violence continued in Russia, Germany, northern Italy, Eastern Europe and areas of the Middle East for several years, along with a global pandemic, astronomically huge monetary depreciations, and vast displacement of refugees. Still, by 1924, the violence seemed to have burnt out. European societies seemed to have attained the national income they had enjoyed in 1913, although their accumulated capital assets had perhaps roughly halved. There was indeed hope for the international pacification signaled by Wilson's project, the League of Nations, but the brutal ideologies that had been spawned during the war and its aftermath were available for another go-round.

Was Wilson wrong to have structured a situation that led the United States into war? It can be argued that if he had not, the Germans might have compelled a settlement that left them supreme on the continent and in the hands of their most authoritarian and militarist leaders. Or one might speculative alternatively that if, absent the Americans, the West had accepted a status quo peace in 1917, the German Right would have been less able to exploit a stab-in-the-back myth of Social-Democratic betrayal at home. Or, conversely, that if the Allies had imposed a harsher and better policed peace after 1918, the Germans would have remained subdued. Or...Or...

The point of this brief piece is not that today's developments will recapitulate those of over a century ago; it is that with multiple variables at stake, there is always the possibility for various forms of disaster (and possibly success). Wilson did not possess perhaps our current president's self-described "stable genius," but he was certainly well equipped in intellectual terms: he had written a foundational text on America government and served as President of Princeton and he weighed each step in the confrontation.

It is an unfortunate fact, however, that graduated and calibrated escalation can be as dangerous as impulsive policies if each side believes it can successfully risk the next incremental raising of the stakes. So, too, policies that seem recommended by economic or financial rationality can produce perverse results. So far financial sanctions have not compelled Russia to negotiate an end to its war in Ukraine. Those tankers we see riding high in the Persian Gulf have not yet been filled and allowed to exit; those outside have not yet been able to enter. Do we even know what a successful outcome should look like when it comes to Iran? Nuclear compliance? Is surrender of already quasi- weapons-grade uranium sufficient? Should we insist on the destruction of reactors or centrifuges? Can we enforce those demands? Should we or should we not aspire to regime change? And if so, for those of us who fear our own or other leaders, in which countries? Is there a great beast slouching to Bethlehem, waiting to be born? Or will we awaken in 2029, if not in 2026, from a fevered dream? Even a stable genius cannot be relied on to steer through perilous straits. Successive and contradictory bouts of braggadocio don't make a strategy, and even a strategy cannot be relied on for a successful outcome. And even if by supreme good fortune, the best possible outcomes might somehow emerge in the Persian Gulf, in Ukraine, and the Middle East will we thereby have to live with the post hoc applause for reckless risk?

Charles S. Maier, May 1, 2026

President Trump’s outburst online -- “Open the fuckin strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell--Just Watch!” -- should be printed and displayed alongside the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other American foundational documents in the public hall of the National Archives. It will instruct future generations of school children and other visitors just how far the United States civic sphere degenerated as the country prepared to celebrate its quarter millennium of independent self-government.

Should such rhetoric -- and similar personal attacks on political opponents -- really matter? Isn’t it just a question of Donald being Donald? Isn’t it better to be open about controversy rather than impose an effete Victorian pudeur about public matters. So, too, why object to a vast gold-plated ballroom and bathroom in the West Wing of the White House since our Silicon Valley tycoons will foot the bill?

Don’t be concerned about the global economy. The labor markets are strong; the markets keep advancing. The major financial funds are enthusiastic about adding crypto as a tradable currency. If it shows signs of wobbling, the Treasury could always declare it an acceptable asset for paying U.S. income tax bills and legal tender for private debts.

Forget, too, for the moment the riskiness of the politics in the Gulf, the open-ended U.S. commitments to Netanyahu’s aspirations and the annexationists that sustain his cabinet. Not to worry about the massing of military power in the Middle East. After all, escalatory moves can always be halted, just as the great powers almost accomplished on the eve of World War I. After all, crises in 1905, 1909, 1911, 1912 and 1913 were successfully overcome. Trump is rational; he backs down from his threats. And we can be certain that the vast nuclear stockpiles held by potential combatants will effectively limit any military action to the new smart weaponry of sub-nuclear drones and cruise missiles. Secretary of War Hegseth’s purge of experienced commanders will assure the American tradition of civilian control of the military.

No -- for the moment just consider the “trivial” question of our civic language, the debasing of a rhetorical tradition that helped assure the idea of a public realm, a res publica that at least claimed to transcend our rulers’ whims and our plutocrats’ ability to claim that their wealth and expertise legitimated their right to rule.

The underlying problematic is indeed profound. The new masters of the universe do organize the skills we need for technological and scientific progress. And it’s easy to point out that the claim of res publica has served as a hypocritical myth, just as it was when Cicero defended the Roman Senate: a way of credentialling the influence, once of the wealthy and today of the university educated as well. It can be claimed that the public sphere or the common good is a myth: Policy can only aggregate private interests, and indeed much of contemporary political science, especially its quantitative practitioners, seems to take that assumption for granted. Why should we begrudge our President and his family the opportunity to enrich themselves? The business of America is business; and all the Schools of Government are not sufficient to undermine that credo, not least because they are funded by wealthy benefactors.

Still...public life in a democracy or even a semi-democracy must be constructed upon the ideal of the public good. Or at least upon the belief that some aspirations are higher or worthier than others. And if we use the term “aspiration” rather than myth, we can defend ourselves against the claim that striving for a greater degree of economic and racial equality is just a tactic for enshrining privilege. The trade-off is not really between equality and freedom. It is between inclusion and restriction. Equality’s opposite is not freedom but the privilege based on the advantages given by one’s community of birth or canny speculation. Over an individual’s lifetime every waystation to greater inclusiveness will eventually be outflanked to the Left and appear a defense of acquired privilege. But, just as important, it will also be continually critiqued from the Right. A two-front struggle is never an enviable or easy strategic stance. But it’s the one that is worth waging. Our values are vectors: at best we move toward them. And how we frame them in words is central to civic culture.

April 6, 2026

At a moment when most public opinion is focused on the possibility of catastrophic general war emanating from the Middle East, the writer may seem to be solipsistic to return to the disputes of a fortnight ago concerning American international economic policy. If so, read this substack as a sort of half-time diversion during the big game over war and peace. A bit of trade to take our mind off more direct threats to survival. (And recall, too, the Greeks had quite an agitated history after dealing with the Persian threat.)

Two venerable theories of economic and social welfare have been contending in the ongoing disputes over trade policy, and these debates will benefit from reviewing the earlier arguments that still come into play. They hinge not on the controversy that the Supreme Court weighed in on its decision last month, namely whether the constitution's authorization of the President's right to "regulate" trade allowed him to determine tariff levels or not. (The Court 's majority of six argued that such regulation did not extend to tariffs since they were revenue measures that the constitution had reserved for Congressional decision making; in other words, the specificity of the power to tax outweighed the president's emergency authority to "regulate.")

The older disagreement concerns the benefit and the cost of "protection" vs. "free trade." Economic "liberals" and today's Democratic Party have long argued that tariffs increase the cost of goods that benefit the home economy for the sake of domestic producers. Why should consumers at home pay higher prices if foreign countries want to sell us their raw materials or autos and shoes at prices lower than we can provide them on our own? Supporters of tariff protection -- today's Republicans -- sometimes charge that foreign producers resort to deliberate underpricing or "dumping." Even when international trade agreements eliminate such policies, these cheap imports arrive at the cost of domestic workers who lose their jobs since wage levels in Asia and Latin America are a fraction of American ones. Free traders point out that factories abroad are in fact often more highly automated and that protecting domestic employment may perpetuate outdated technologies and equipment. They have also contended that unless we open our markets other countries will retaliate against our exports. This was the argument that Southern states mobilized before the Civil War when cotton exports to Lancashire cotton mills soared and that our agricultural producers relied on after World War II.

Throughout these recurring debates other disputes have lurked. Protectionist countries have allegedly been less democratic and more prone to resort to armed conflict as a tool of policy, witness allegedly the united German Empire organized by Otto von Bismarck around the 1870s and continued through the Third Reich. As Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Cordell Hull, himself a Republican, argued when the New Deal decisively moved to replace high tariffs with reciprocal-trade agreements after 1934, nations' foreign policies echoed trade policies. The political line-up followed the economic line-up.

Even earlier in the eighteenth century, political reformers had argued that international trade, gentle commerce in the words of Montesquieu (and reprised in the 1950s by the American economist Albert Hirschman) served as an alternative to military competition. On the other side, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had pleaded for the value of "the closed trading state," as a corollary of populist political revival for a Prussia then weakened by Napoleon's military supremacy.

The world depression of the 1930s with its mass unemployment and depressed agricultural prices put free-trade commitments to their hardest test. Insistence on free-trade seemed particularly to accentuate the hardship of the rural sectors throughout the global economy. Primary products, such as wheat, corn, hogs, cotton, even oil and rubber, could not all be absorbed in peacetime, even if prices fell catastrophically. Price supports and tariffs at home and international agreements or cartels to limit output seemed necessary to reverse the free-fall. Even such a cosmopolitan as John Maynard Keynes endorsed them. Let ideas travel freely, he argued, but products not so much. Britain, the paradigmatic free-trade nation, reintroduced a general tariff in 1932 for the first time since the repeal of its duties on wheat (the "corn laws") in 1847. In 1949, faced with its persistent weakness on current account in the wake of WW II, Britain also faced the hitherto unthinkable and devalued the pound by 40 percent.

The more precise question perhaps is what ideas travel freely when trade and investment do not. The important American economist and historian of economic ideas Jacob Viner sought to sum up the debate in 1948 in his essay "Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." He insisted that the "versus" referred to the subsequent intellectual and historical debate about the mercantilist policies of that earlier era, not to the contemporary policy alternatives. Power -- but in the wide sense of assuring national security, not necessarily for territorial expansion in a militarized competition -- required plenty in the sense of assuring the country's economic welfare. They were believed to be complementary. Still, Viner's "mercantilists" of the seventieth and eighteenth century felt that a positive balance of trade with an inflow of bullion was the best index of plenty, and Viner conceded that "the economics at least was generally misguided and "served to poison international relations." Free trade would ultimately increase both power and plenty. They were not a trade-off but complementarity. Britain benefited from both in the nineteenth century; the United States would benefit from both in the twentieth; and so, too, global peace and prosperity would benefit from both.

It is easy to point out that these analyses were often over-simplified. Britain's capacity to maintain free trade and a high level of imports rested as the economic historian Marcello De Cecco demonstrated, upon the control of its colonies, in particular the role of India as a source of inexpensive imports and a protected purchaser of manufactures. Marxist theorists of "unequal exchange" generalized the argument to argue that the "Third World" was durably disadvantaged with respect to the industrialized countries. The relatively favorable "over-valuation" of the dollar ratified by the Bretton Woods agreements when the United States emerged unscathed from World War II helped sustain Western economic growth from the late 1940s until the beginning of the 1970s. Pace Keynes it is not clear that ideas will travel without let or hindrance when economic interchange is durably restricted. But ideas, politics, and economic systems cohere differently in different historical eras. The contests over DEI and the merits of tariffs unroll together in the United States today. We hardly know yet how the twenty-first century system will find whatever equilibrium it may even briefly achieve.

What follows is not an effort to deploy a historical analogy, but a brief reflection on the politics of historiographical interpretation. In 1939 the eminent medieval historian Marc Bloch published his great two-volume analysis of the structure of medieval Western Europe: La Société Féodale. in the notable French interwar series L’Evolution de Humanité, edited by Henri Berr. An English translation, Feudal Society followed quickly a year later 1940 (trans. by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1940. (It’s now available as a Hein online or University of Chicago Press online edition.) Also in 1939 the Austro-German medievalist Otto Brunner published his own major work, Land und Herrschaft, to be translated more than fifty years later as Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992 and now Project Muse online). Brunner’s work followed in a tradition of Volksgeschichte, which unsurprisingly enjoyed a high reputation in German-speaking Europe in the 1930ss, 1940s, and into the 1950s. He was awarded the Verdun Prize in 1941, and the later wartime edition featured a preface that he proudly signed as engaged “in military service.” In 1944 Marc Bloch was arrested for involvement with a Resistance cell in Lyon and executed as a hostage on June 16, ten days after the Allies had landed in Normandy. Put perhaps tendentiously, the political bearers of the tradition Brunner identified with in 1944 executed the political bearers of the tradition Bloch identified with.

Brunner did not escape unscathed; given his enthusiasms, the Allied Occupation authorities suspended him from university teaching until the early 1950s. Nonetheless, the tradition he identified with came to prosper again and, it must be admitted, produced important historical work in the postwar decades. Its most significant contribution perhaps was what might be translated as the history of political concepts, represented by the eight-volume work Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Fundamental Historical Concepts), that Brunner, now in from the cold, co-edited with Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck beween 1972 and 1997 -- a collective effort that might be seen as providing a German fulfillment of Quentin Skinner’s program.

The editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe shared Koselleck’s notion that political language exerted a formative influence on political realities --Koselleck’s major stand-alone history explored the contradictions inherent between the Prussian effort at legal and bureaucratic reform between 1791 and 1848 and early economic and social development of a dynamic capitalist society. (Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1891 bis 1848 [Stuttgart. Klett-Cotta, 1981].) But Brunner’s work focused on the formation of feudalism and then on the aristocratic values of the seventeenth century. Those discussing his work have differed on his implications -- some claiming that his work aligns him with Carl Schmitt on the centrality of conflict as the basis of politics, others writing that his stress on the organic community that feudal leadership required was incompatible with Schmitt. This seems a rather forced interpretation.

Brunner’s Land and Lordship presupposes enmity, in specific the “feud,” which is the underlying condition that drives the feudal leader to recruit and support a body of loyal warrior adherents. They in turn have a vital interest in perpetuating warfare. Feudal government arises from the highly personalized organization of private armies. The contemporary reader may well be led to think of the Mexican or Central American “cartels,” with their codes of violence and reprisal. Extend their power over two centuries and perhaps they might become the basis for a future aristocracy. But the Mexican cartels build their influcnce within territories that already have a legitimate state; for Brunner, the cartels become the state.

For Bloch, in contrast, feudalism provided the basis for jurisdictions and emerging states not through conflict but expanding structures of reciprocal loyalties. It is the exchange of obligations that characterizes feudalism. At its heart is the exchange of personal loyalty between lord and vassal, expressed by the vassal placing his hands between those of his lord and receiving a kiss (and as increasingly formalized, an office or fief). The structures could become cross-cutting and complex; elaborate networks of graded reciprocity that generated loyalties and usages, and certainly loyalties. Of course, this system grew within the dispersion of legal authority that we think after the collapse of Roman power; of course, too, it entailed long centuries of dispersed violence. Bloch begins his narrative with the specter of violent outsiders, the Norsemen, ravaging the communities along the French rivers. But for Bloch at least feudalism pointed to the development of exchange and reciprocity as a normative horizon.

It is worth pondering these underlying mentalities. We find Brunner’s analogues today among those who take pride in a warrior ethos, brandish the rhetoric of unlimited destruction, and envisage continued violence as the underlying way of the world. There is no preponderance of evidence to say they are wrong. Bloch did not survive the war; Brunner did. But Bloch’s principles survived and Brunner’s did not although no victory is ever guaranteed. Historians should not choose their narrative by political preferences. But neither must they write off alternative outcomes. When the historical material can allow multiple interpretations perhaps it is licit, even incumbent to emphasize the possibilities for hope.

I have always appreciated this short poem by Robert Frost, and it seems adaptable to our American circumstances today, so I am posting it for readers.”

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

With President Trump's apparent climb-down at Davos, the most dangerous phase of the recent crisis he provoked seems over. I can't add much to the eloquent denunciations of our president's globally destructive behavior that editorialists across the western world (and my friend Art Goldhammer close to home) have not already recorded. We have been watching a child-like creature --pure Id, as Freudians might have said when Freudian analysis held weight -- indulge his unconstrained impulses. "Play my game or I will knock over the global order that has benefited the United States so greatly over the last 80 years along with the constitutional balances within the United States."

But let me try to accent some lessons that some of us hitherto complacent liberals should draw from this episode whose consequences will be unfolding for a long time. First, institutions -- domestic as well as international -- aren't as robust as we'd like to think them. Gifted leaders, sometimes virtuous, sometimes malevolent, can stretch them or shatter them. The statutes are open to interpretation. We can't really have a government of laws without a government of men (and women) who tell us what the laws now intend or originally intended when they were crafted. And therefore character, that old-fashioned concept along with virtue, matters.

History, too, has to be interpreted. It doesn't teach by itself. The past is the storehouse of what might prove useful knowledge, but we're less certain of what makes it useful. We know how its analogies fall short or are imperfect. As a "science" or type of knowledge, it is like the Delphic oracle, which gave ambiguous messages to priestesses in a trance. Interpreted imperfectly the predictions lead to catastrophe: remember Croesus of Lydia who did not stop to think that the kingdom he was told would be destroyed would be his own. We look for "trends," that is predictable trajectories of events. Only future outcomes, however, will reveal what was a trend and not a dead end. We honor historians who seem to be successful trend spotters at the time they produce their work. And since we can only see trends in the rearview mirror, we discern them, like Benjamin's angel of history, as a stream of events or wreckage unfolding behind us.

Analogies or "parallels' are to history as metaphor is to poetry and fiction: They breathe life into discussions of the past and present, but they cannot provide absolutely congruent situations. If one element of the parallel is discordant, the utility of comparison with the past can be shattered. Nonetheless partial parallels can still be illuminating. As I reflect on possible analogies, given my own field of study, I am struck by German hybris in the early twentieth century -- not Hitler's Germany, but Imperial Germany in the years before World War I, when its ruling class could not understand why the other European powers thought it reckless and arrogant. Its policy makers and intellectuals saw each of their initiatives as justified defensive responses: Britain had a large fleet, hence Germany needed one too -- not really to surpass England, but to make it too risky for Britain to use its own aggressively. Russia and France had formed an alliance and enlarged their armies, therefore the Germans must as well, although the French and Russians were themselves reacting to German enlargement. Kaiser William II (1890-1918) had the habit of stretching the relatively cautious public role that European heads of state had come to adopt, and his successive advisers came to indulge his willful statements or even to adopt his risky behavior as their own. German policy makers thought they were being "encircled," and losing out in the competition for overseas empire. Germany, they claimed, only wanted its own "place in the sun." When the French who ruled Algeria moved to dominate the policy of independent Morocco -- a policy that Marshall Lyautey likened to the capillary spread of a spot of ink -- the Germans ostentatiously supported the Moroccans, which only prompted closer Anglo-French defensive arrangements. Berlin repeated the challenge in Morocco a few years later, once again to provoke even more binding Anglo-French coordinated policy. At home the Kaiser believed that his constitutional role as commander in chief should be endorsed by his ministers and recognized by the opposition. There was no supreme court to deter him; but then, had there been, it might well have recognized his prerogatives, much as the U.S. Supreme Court's majority has so far deferred to the American executive. The major party on the Left, the Social Democrats, was growing sufficiently strong to worry the governments of the center and right and to denounce the Kaiser's rashness, but when the crisis of summer 1914 broke, it also could not resist the pressure for a German military response.

There are lessons to be learned -- not ones that allow reliable prediction, but those that inspire caution. First, individuals or small groups may make meaningful decisions, but all decisions tend to limit future options, and those limitations tend to present themselves as "structural" as we look back on them. Structures are events in the rear-view mirror. But as such they exert a fateful constraint. Crises are cumulative. As they pile up, they make future crises harder to solve. History is not subject to a statute of limitations. Those who yielded at the brink in 1905, or 1910-1911 may not be ready to yield again lest their credibility be sacrificed.

There is another way in which a sense of structure emerges, namely the interlocking of different arenas of potential conflict that may seem to be safely compartmentalized. The First World War was ultimately triggered not by Anglo-German-French competition, but Austro-German-Russian frictions in the Balkans. Because of the interlocking alliances these regions of rivalry could not be hermetically sealed from each other. So, too, by the 1930s, crises in East Asia and in Europe powerfully influenced each other. Today, Ukraine and Taiwan are linked in a geopolitical intersectionality. Finally, there are structures perhaps of human behavior, choices that we ascribe to inherited traits or to mental compulsions that we cannot discern but which every trial judge, indeed which every human must try to take account of in choosing intimate partners, raising children, and entrusting the public spheres to political leaders.

We cannot guard against all contingencies but we can take reasonable precautions and try to correct egregiously dangerous errors. Contemplating Russia's assault on Ukraine, Israel's destructive campaign in Gaza, and Trump's willful performances of hegemony in the Western hemisphere as well as his demands for Greenland, the temptation is to think that somehow a providential justice will finally operate to humble these excesses. "The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small." Unfortunately they grind masses of relatively innocent actors along the way. If there is a providence at work, it leaves us to our own devices. Humanity makes its own history -- but that doesn't mean it makes it well. To cite someone who thought about these issues and understood the value of metaphor, it doesn't make it out of whole cloth. Even more fatefully, majorities can turn their history over to those who give all signs of making it disastrously. We are still in the midst of that experiment.

What was 'The Rules-Based International Order'?

What really do we deplore about President Trump's abduction of Venezuela's dictator Nicholas Maduro? That he violated the so-called rules-based international order allegedly prevailing since 1945? The rules and the institutions embodying them -- the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights and the convention against genocide, the IMF and World Bank -- were shaped at a moment of exceptional American power after we had defeated really repressive and aggressive state actors: the Third Reich and a militarized and brutal Japanese regime. The rules and institutions seemed a worthy alternative to international power politics even at moments the US went on to administer a world order that often shielded new authoritarian dictators. The rules-based international order was the product of a very specific historical moment, which does not mean that it has been an unworthy aspiration. But its achievement has rested as much on the inequality of nations as on their equality.

Is the lament that Trump violated a nation's sovereignty? But Americans have long stressed the rights of individuals as well as states, at least white males but expanded to include finally African-Americans after 1865. For the past decade or more most American policy makers and foreign-policy observers believed that Maduro's rule grievously violated the sovereignty of Venezuela's citizens.

Or are we unhappy that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited the Monroe Doctrine -- at least the original doctrine of 1823 that warned the Restoration monarchies of Spain and France not to take advantage of the Latin American revolutions to attempt a reconquest of their New World empires. That early bit of U.S. bravado was feasible because America understood that the British would likely provide the sea power to enforce our unilateral declaration, indeed was motivated in part to avoid Foreign Minister George Canning's earlier suggestion for a joint statement. More disturbing about Trump's and Rubio's invocation of our right to intervention in our hemisphere, however, if we recall the early 20th-century U.S. legislation and treaties that overtly justified the continuing American intervention in Cuba and Central America, and then later in the Cold War, our interventions since the 1960s.

Do we object to the fact that Trump seems to prioritize American objectives as the recovery of our despoliated oil resources? (Contemporary oil concessions after a century of conflict have come to split the royalties between the host nation and the foreign developers.) Or do we share Congressman Seth Moulton's blurted-out comment that the intervention was "insane" in the sense that distant consequences are incalculable. Or do we really object that it was President Trump, our own would-be authoritarian, who took this step because we fear his domestic policies? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive on economic issues who, alas, defended deplorable racial policies, justified his intervention in the Mexican Revolution: "We will teach the Mexicans to elect good men." A lesson we might take to heart at home.

Face it, for those who really believe in a rules-based international order a dilemma arises if the intervention yields beneficent results, unlikely as that may currently seem. Of course, the timeline for tallying the outcome can be extended until some adverse consequences result. We critics have to be willing to maintain that even if Venezuela becomes an outpost of stable democracy and oil resources flow like milk and honey to the benefit of its own citizens as well as for our oil "majors", the intervention that brought it about was destructive for a world of global norms. (No one yet to my knowledge has focused on the impact on climate change.)

The point is that in a multinational world, the ideal of global norms will always be in tension with the values of national sovereignty, and the conflict cannot be wished away. On the one side the primacy of international law and the equal rights for very unequal state, on the other side, the world of Realpolitik and sacro egoismo, and of Carl Schmitt's cynical view that international law really arose as a compact to keep peace among the Europeans as they appropriated the lands beyond.

As a liberal I find it hard to get beyond an uneasy and often inconsistent set of compromises: a belief in constructing norms that powerful states, or at least my own state, must occasionally disregard. This is a lesson at least one can draw after watching decades of debate in the UN. Even if we try to construct a rules-based order, the rules, as all parents know, will invite testing. The search for doctrine will confront the agony of the specific case, and the outcome may well depend upon the balance of party politics at home. A British Liberal cabinet came to the defense of Belgium in 1914 "for a scrap of paper," but a Conservative government pressured Czechoslovakia not to force it to honor its pledges in 1938. How will NATO members interpret the Article 5 of the North Atlantic Pact if Russia muscles in on Estonia? How far will the U.S. go to defend Taiwan? More immediately, how robustly will Europeans and the United States continue to support Ukraine against Russian demands? We aspire to a rule-based order, or a "doctrine" that settles debate. But doctrine is constantly tested. Should we, therefore, abandon it altogether and revert to pure casuistry? I would argue that there is a case for soft or aspirational law. But one must also recognize at least that the U.S. cannot keep claiming exceptions to the rule and also expect hope that the rule-based "order," such as it is, will remain an "order." This rule binds the powerful as well as the weak.

With great admiration for Rosenfeld’s original conceptualization and rich documentation, I am prompted to describe the political choices that the Trump era will have left us with as “The Age of Trade-Offs” rather than the “Age of Choice.” Let me try to explain the difference, which may be one prompted only by this reader’s temperament. Rosenfeld understands that all choices exclude other choices, but her overall context is one of the modern era’s expanding options in the modern era. The “production possibility frontier,” to use the economist’s terms moves outward from its origin. Even taking account of notable regressions, “the age of choice,” which she traces back to the Protestant Reformation, has created more wealth and more opportunities for personal and political freedom.

For the Age of Trade-Offs, the I am struck more by the fundamental conflict of values that our society seeks to maximize, in particular the difficulty of reconciling justice with political stability in the wake of dictatorship, war, and atrocities. The production possibility frontier for these two goods, justice and reconciliation, is relatively fixed. For many years before my retirement in 2019, I taught a course on political trials and political justice from Socrates to the fall of Communism, and indeed I am currently trying to construct a book around the material I taught. The literature is enormous, as one could expect given the material: slavery, genocide, imperialism, war crimes, apartheid, and the toll taken by authoritarian regimes. (I would signal most recently Gary J. Bass’s monumental Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, Knopf, 2023 and Vintage paperback, 2024).

The histories built on these themes make clear the hard choices left in the wake of authoritarianism, racist policies, and war. On the one hand, can successor political systems really build democratic institutions without bringing to justice the participants and collaborators in the previous dictatorships? Must the former victims live alongside their former tormenters without any redress? On the other hand, since collaboration was so widespread and rooted in the military services, police, and paramilitary institutions of the dictatorship, can the new regime really afford to purge and punish without provoking counter-revolutionary resistance? Does civil peace preclude retribution, and does democratization not require punishment of prior atrocious behavior?

After World War II and the defeat of the Axis, retributive justice could be attempted and was carried out in part, whether by successor regimes or the victorious allies. It was highly imperfect: “little fish” were often tried while “big fish” often got away. The original Nuremberg trial excluded Nazi crimes within Germany. It identified “crimes against humanity,” but not genocide per se excluded trying the National Socialist regime for crimes within Germany. Subsequent trials by the occupying powers focused on selected civil servants, doctors, industrialists and concentration camp personnel. Only at the end of the 1950s did the Germans themselves initiate prosecutions. And an active civic consensus based on recognizing and rejecting the National Socialist legacy arguably had to wait until a new generation came of age in the late 1960s -- not without the turmoil of ‘sixty-eight.” (See Andrew Port’s Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, Harvard University Press, 2023). There was no equivalent process in Italy; nor did the post-Franco regime in Spain initiate comparable trials.

But by the 1980s and 1990s the regimes changed: in Eastern Europe, Russia, Latin America and South Africa. Transformation percolated from a host of reasons -- the economic disparity with the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the steady growth of dissent, the costs of the arms race, and in South Africa, the isolation of the regime. The forces for transformation were committed, however, to peaceful transition, and essentially accepted a bargain; foreswearing prosecution of former rulers in return for the establishment of “truth and reconciliation commissions,” which would grant amnesties in return for testimony from former officials, including police and military. The system became known as “transitional justice.” Martha Minow of the Harvard Law School wrote the classic text on the process: Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Beacon Press, 1998); see also the collection, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton University Press, 2000). In South Africa, the idea of reconciliation attained a religious aura in part through the example of Nelson Mandela and the activity of Bishop Tutu. Not every victim or victim’s dear ones -- mothers most notably of young, assassinated activists -- was willing to accept this bargain.

The overall pattern seems to be that only when a disgraced regime has been militarily defeated have atrocities been vigorously prosecuted by its successors. The establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1993 and the International Court of Justice established by the 1998 Rome Statute -- which the United States declined to sign-- have yielded more encouraging results. Former rulers and under indictment have yielded to its jurisdiction, and successor regimes in Sierra Leon and Serbia have surrendered defendants to its jurisdiction.

We do not know whether the Trump regime will endure past the 1926 elections. We do know that the corruption, rhetoric, and unilateral action supposedly against terrorists is unprecedented since the Civil War, the suppression of freed Blacks after 1866, or the Indian clearances. But let us face facts: no American leaders are likely to deliver indicted leaders to an international trial. Those fearful of being captured abroad under the notion of “universal jurisdiction” are unlikely to expose themselves to that possibility. Will Americans ever try political abuses at home? Presidential impeachment has never yielded conviction. Still, we may someday (if we emerge intact from the Trump infringements on due process) have to face the question: reconciliation or trials, or even “restorative justice” and truth commissions?

Will reconciliation trump justice? Should it? After the bloody tyranny of “The Thirty” collapsed at the close of the Peloponnesian War, the restored Athenian democracy passed an amnesty that included a stipulation never to speak of the episode -- literally to consign it to amnesia or oblivion. At the end of the long French Wars of Religion, a similar prohibition was instituted. I would wager on the coming amnesia. Nations are communities that usually fall back on believing in their own redeeming virtues. Amnesia is likely to trump justice assuming that we exit from the Trump era short of large-scale violence. I am old enough to probably settle for the bargain. Others may not.

December 1, 2025

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According to the regulations listed in Leviticus, Hebrews were to let their lands lie fallow every seventh year; and after seven cycles of seven years -- that is, in the fiftieth year or the Year of Jubilee -- fellow Jews in debt servitude were to be released from their obligations and their foreclosed lands restored. After all, God had supposedly given the land of Israel to the Jewish people; rightly considered they were trustees, not owners. The process of claiming their trusteeship had not been pretty, but it was related in a separate historical book of the Old Testament, as would be the later story of the vicissitudes of the Hebrew state(s). The Greek amnesty was not fixed calendrically but usually tied to the "forgetting" of blood crimes, individual or collective (such as the brief but bloody rule of "the thirty" in Athens), in an effort to stop cycles of revenge. None of the authors of these accounts, Hebrew or Greek, claims that Jubilee or Amnesty is a system of perfect justice. They merely say that cycles of violence or enslavement or confiscations need to end. Some will remain unsatisfied; others will get off undeservedly. Contemporary proponents of these "bottom lines" call these messy interventions restorative justice and they claim that it serves communities doomed to live together better than retributive justice. I reluctantly tend to agree. But some deals seem more just or justified than others.

Who will benefit from the amnesties after the current cryptomania and AI boom crashes? Provisions for bankruptcy and receivership are capitalism's counterpart to restorative justice: messy, unfair perhaps in the eyes of those with more primitive ideas of equity, but needed for systemic reasons. Capitalism has a relatively simple procedural rule for allocating the losses. Those who get in first and get out before the crash win in this game, above all if they can continually convince new investors that they too will benefit, until they can't. The earlier beneficiaries provide different rationales: after all, they are taking relatively "idle" savings and mobilizing them for some genuine innovations and growth; the destruction they may bring about along the way is not only inevitable; it is "creative." The significance of the cheerful adjective outweighs the half-hearted acknowledgment of the noun. (For a useful discussion of the legal aspects see Katherina Pistor's The Code of Capital, Princeton University Press, 2019.)

There are costs that these masters of finance do not calculate, but they are collective and not just to be borne by the unfortunate chumps who got taken in. Systemic failures undermine liberal democratic political systems. Sometimes those who clean up the political fall-out wear boots and uniforms and not designer suits. They abolish the judicial norms and don't appreciate criticism, even to the point of beating up, abusing, or locking up those who insist on speaking out. Vocal kids can disappear; vocal women can get raped. Constitutional guarantees may have to be tweaked; universities supervised even as they are subventioned. But mature folk don't fight the second law of thermodynamics and they don't rage against the system that has created so much wealth. Rarely have so few owed so much to so many.

Charles Maier, 10/14/25

His murder may well signal the way the American political system dissolves into civil war -- not only by the assembling of large armies into territorial blocs based on a fundamental national disagreement as Lincoln recognized in his second inaugural address delivered some five weeks before he was slain -- but by retail assassinations. Indeed, the outbreak of the South's rebellion was preceded by smaller-scale violence: the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate, the gang attacks in Kansas and Nebraska, John Brown's attack on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry. Nonetheless We can examine other cases where acts of retail violence have preceded systemic uprising. The early years of the Weimar Republic were marked by some spectacular killings. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by right-wing militia men in Berlin in mid-January 1919. The left socialist Hugo Haase, active in the revolution of 1918, was killed in November 1918. The Catholic Party leader, Matthias Erzberger, was gunned down in the Black Forest in late August 1921, and Foreign Secretary Walter Rathenau, loosely affiliated with the center-left German Democratic Party, was assassinated in June 1922. They, too, were victims of ultra right-wing violence, which was recognized as such. After Rathenau's murder, Chancellor Josef Wirth of the Center Party denounced the spokesman for the far right's German National People's Party in the Reichstag and declared pointedly in parliament, "This enemy stands on the Right." Emergency police powers were passed to police potentially violent groups. And despite the hopes of the extra-parliamentary Right the Republic stabilized once the hyper-inflation was ended at the end of 1923 and 1924. Its hopeful years ended a short six years thereafter in late 1929-1930 with the stock market crash, the death of moderate conservative foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, mounting unemployment, and a parliamentary deadlock on funding the over-burdened social insurance funds. Did the violence until 1924 help determine the dénouement of 1930-33? In September 1930 elections the National Socialists vaulted from 12 to 108 out of approximately 600 Reichstag seats. The Social Democrats practiced a policy of "toleration -- that is of not voting against the centrist government's use of emergency powers to decree a budget -- but by July 1932 the Nazis won about one third of the Reichstag, and pluralities in some of the state legislatures -- a configuration that today's electoral advance of the AFD uncannily parallels. Ultimately it did not need assassination to bring Hitler into a coalition cabinet at the end of January 1933; and the Reichstag fire shortly after cowed the Reichstag deputies into voting him full decree powers. Social Democrats alone resisted; Communist deputies had already been arrested; Catholics capitulated in return for a Concordat between the Vatican and Hitler's government.

Political assassination also marked the final months of the five-year-old Spanish Republic after the Popular Front Victory of January 1936. Tit-for-tat political strikes and repression had marked the transition to a rightwing government in 1934 and left its shadow over day-to-day politics. The Left's parliamentary come-back in 1936 brought another upsurge of violence from the left and the right. The anarcho-syndicalist left eschewed parliamentary politics but dominated the trade-union confederation, could not or would not stop church burning and individual murders. The most spectacular was the assassination of conservative political leader, José Calvo Sotelo by a socialist, in turn a reprisal for an assassination earlier of a a leader of a socialist affiliated paaramilitary group. Five days later, four of the rightist army generals staged their own rebellion and drew on units based in Spanish Morocco. Thereupon the left seized the territorial garrisons where it could (most notably in Barcelona and Madrid) and the division of the country was set for the ensuing three years of armed conflict, revolution, and repression in both "halves" of the country.

Political assassination also marked the transition in Japan from a conservative parliamentary system, with governments often led by generals, into an effective de facto dictatorship let by the military. Younger rightist military officers, sometimes veterans of the occupation army in Manchuria, effectively wielded political murder to cow civilian leaders and even the older military establishment. In 1921 rightists killed, the head of the first party cabinet based on the parties in the Diet, who was also a founder of one of the big-business combinations or zaibatsu. Through the mid 1920s, though Japan continued to develop a vigorous public sphere and parliamentary culture. But the rise of the Chinese Nationalists who stood in the way of Japan's expansion on the Asian continent, the toll of the economic crisis on agriculture and peasant farms radicalized opinion. Manchuria became a province for Japanese expansion and nurturing political violence. On May 15, 1932, (so-called 5-15) members of the Blood Pledge League assassinated the then prime minister though they failed to take over the government. and on 2-26-36 rightist officers attempted another coup, killing ministers and holding key offices in Tokyo before standing down. Although the government executed three of the rebels, the threat of assassination hung over the liberals in both major parties and prodded the military to take control of the state, Emulating the Italian fascists and the German National Socialists, the military organized an umbrella national movement in 1940, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association-- in theory not a party in theory, but an umbrella organization that enlisted mass appeal for assure military-expansionist ends. The question of how fascist the polity became by the end of the 1930s has remained debated; the most ardent terrorists wanted to transcend capitalism or at least impose state supervision of an economy organized for war and assassinated the orthodox economic minister of finance in the 1932 putsch attempt. Assassination thus played a significant role in undermining any resistance to military dictatorship. It was hardly just a picturesque recourse by individual extremists.

The U.S. has long had a tradition of political violence (recall the assassinations of 1968) and increasingly in recent years displays of ideological polarization. The bien pensant reaction to violence usually involves a plea for compromise across party aisles to reconstitute the center and restore American politics to its supposed tradition of non-ideological competition for office. New York Times columnist David Brooks is perhaps its most insistent advocate; but it finds wider expression after every act of violence in the phrase, "This is not who we are." I cannot judge who we people are, but I can see what they do. It is not clear that we can untangle the killer from the milieu.

I would hesitate to prescribe any policies especially since restricting access to weapons has remained largely out of reach. But we should recognize that we are not good at changing hearts and minds even if we long to do so. What might safely be said about political murder -- or more precisely by exemplary assassination or even just plain old mob pogroms -- is, yes, that it can arise in an atmosphere of polarization, but it can also be an idiopathic act on the part of individuals who have adjustment "problems" we discover after the act itself. But do these after-the-fact diagnoses have any prophylactic value? Herostratus famously burned down the temple of Ephesus just to escape anonymity and be remembered. When political passions run deep, it must remain a temptation to demonstrate one's personal sincerity and credentials. Most problematic for those untempted to ask whether violence would make things better, it can seem a rational calculation to some. The problem of politically inspired killing may abate or burn itself out for a while if we are lucky...or, given current divisions, may hang around. The most disturbing possibility is that perhaps individual killings postpone the advent of wholesale civil war even as they make it harder to avert.

September 14, 2025

One hundred eleven years ago this summer, the European great powers made the fateful decisions that brought about the first general war on the continent since 1815. For the first couple of weeks after the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne in remote Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, they hardly seemed aware of how dangerous a concatenation of events was unfolding. Once they did, they could not or chose not to extricate themselves. The reasons for the fatal one-way descent repay analysis in light of current great-power strutting.

Great Britain joined France and Russia (despite their many decades of rivalry) as Germany and Austria-Hungary unleashed a risky punitive action against Serbia for what they deemed their vital national interests. With the Ottoman Empire's choice to join the conflict in December, Japan's pressure on China, Italy's entry in May 1915, and the United States' entrance in April 1917, and the fighting in African colonies, the war encompassed much of the globe.

Christopher Clark's engaging narrative of 2012 used the term "The Sleepwalkers" -- a fateful somnambulism -- to describe the European descent into war. And the term does convey the sense of an almost drugged inability to halt the process of escalation. Indeed, some of the powers' responses seem heedless of possible or probable consequences: the Serbian minister of the Interior winked at the plot to assassinate the heir to the Habsburg throne; the Austrians demanded that the Serbs allow them to supervise the investigation into the plot as a pretext for invasion. Russia ordered mobilization along to dissuade Austria-Hungary from any attack on Serbia. Berlin gave virtually unconditional support to Austria, even to the point of demanding that the French evacuate their frontier fortresses to demonstrate that they would not support any Russian intervention. Each government came to believe that its status as a viable international actor was at stake.

But sleepwalking, I think, does not quite capture the process of escalation although it is most apt perhaps in describing the Austro-Hungarian confidence that it might clean up its Balkan problems while leaving the larger European consequences to the Germans. It had been clear for years that Europe was locked into rival alliances, which if intended for effective deterrence, could precisely therefore entail dangerous wagers. Each of the large states had hawkish and dovish parties contending for influence at home. Such a division is characteristic even when decision making was the prerogative of non-elected elites. We think in terms of states as the molecules of an international system, but the state is a resultant of forces; its policies are up for grabs. Foreign policy is a stake in the struggle at home even as it shapes that domestic rivalry. Bismarck had said that unified Germany was a satiated power after unifying Germany in 1871, but by annexing Alsace-Lorraine he had provided a continuing source of grievance for French rightwing nationalists. France certainly did not march into Germany in 1914 and it comes off better in terms of its crisis behavior, but since the mid-1890s Paris felt impelled to firm up its alliance with Russia and its less formal but significant military commitments with Britain.

I am reminded of these complex events that can tend toward catastrophic outcomes precisely by events unfolding now. Putin, Xi Jinping, and the status-hungry leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, have just held a summit in Beijing to demonstrate that their axis can stand up to the United States and Western allies. Israel has been supported since October 7, 2023, in the same unconditional way as Austria was by Germany in 1914, and the Israeli expansionists now in power are locked into a war they seem unwilling to terminate. Prime Minister Netanyahu has seemingly staked his political survival upon enlarging the hostilities to the brink of a general Middle Eastern war along with the willful extermination of Palestinian lives and extinction of any plausible Palestinian community in Gaza. Alliances are important but guarantor powers should learn that solidarity need not require blank checks for every action its partner may embark upon. The American administration seems to be energized by talking war. President Trump, originally cautious about endorsing aggressive policies (outside the tariff arena) has bombed a boat allegedly carrying drugs as if were a confirmed military target in wartime and deploys a masked paramilitary force as well as reservists to inflame confrontation at home. He has renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War, claiming that we have been unable to fight for victory under the former designation. Secretary Hegseth seems to delight in girding his loins as generalissimo. He and President Trump exhibit a need for validation and recognition as tough guys offering others' blood and tears without their own sweat or toil.

Perhaps we can think more soberly through the lessons of these dangerous moments. Once again in such a climate of systemic confrontation, smaller countries become the trigger points for general conflict. Some merit the intervention of their larger allies if they remain democratic and do not seek to exploit their status for dreams of aggrandizement. Territorial compromises imposed by great powers (viz. Munich) can be dishonorable, but not always. Pace General MacArthur, there are substitutes for victory. Statesmen are not usually sleepwalking; but they can be heedless. And no matter how prudent or how resolute or how wise they are, the system of multiple sovereign states imposes costly conditions, compromise, and change. Perhaps the unsatisfying maxim for all of us should be, above all do less harm.

9/4/2025

As a historian with an. occasional sideline in economic and financial cycles, I watch the vertiginous ascent of crypto with fear and trembling, Granted, money is a Pirandellan invention: value it has when we think it has. Monetary theorists used to distinguish between money that was "backed" by something finite and of substance -- gold or silver, or in some cases specific commodities or land -- and fiat money that states or banks declared they'd accept or disburse in payment for goods, services, and taxes without a promise of redemption in precious metals. But of course, the value of a backing in gold or silver was itself a convention that seemed socially useful to men and women of property, just as measures of land, length, and weight were. Long distance traders often issued letters of credit of credit that served as monetary equivalents and in the late seventeenth century the Whig parliamentary majority gave its approval to a private "Bank of England" that granted wealthy subscribers the right to issue letters of credit and promissory notes that could be exchanged as a national currency. For the long-term story see Niall Ferguson's, The Ascent of Money (Penguin, 2008).

The fate of money often depends upon the results of war. The American "continental" issued by the Continental Congress depreciated rapidly during the American revolution and after, until the new federal government decided on a national Bank of the United States that could issue notes. Its charter was allowed to expire but a Second Bank was chartered in 1816 for 20 years. President Jackson vetoed renewal of its charter. What followed was a wild monetary scene as state and private banks issued notes, whose value rested ultimately on the prospects for cotton produced by Black slave labor in the deep South and responding to the appetite of Lancashire textile factories, a pattern reproduced in many sites worldwide as Sven Beckert has documented in Empire of Cotton (Penguin-Random House, 2014). Land prices on the southern frontier followed the demand for cotton and led to a a speculative bubble that collapsed in 1837 followed by a trans-Atlantic depression into the 1840s.

The collapse of the secessionist southern Confederacy in 1864-65 destroyed the value of its currency. The North also issued paper currency ("Greenbacks") that it offered to redeem with silver certificates in the late 1860s. Redemption meant contraction of the post-Civil War money supply, with spectacular bankruptcies in New York and Vienna in 1873 and radiating throughout western Europe. helping to trigger the panics of 1873. Deflation followed, so did the demand for protective tariffs to protect agricultural as well as industrial interests. Agriculture faced hard times; nonetheless, real industrial expansion and significant innovation, including electrical lighting and telephones and refrigeration, assembly lines and early motor cars, followed within a corset of tight money and protective tariffs until new gold reserves from South Africa and Alaska came on stream from 1896.

The interwar experience of tariff protection at the onset of the global contraction of 1929-31 is also less clear than usually presented. The Smoot-Hawley tariff may have accelerated a crisis of international trade, but whence the sources of the great interwar depression originated, and its inevitability or lack thereof, is a thorny question. The Johnson Act of 1924 that restricted immigration was probably an equal disaster. It bottled up excess agriculture labor in Eastern Europe and contributed to rising populist nationalism and facilitated Nazi Germany's constructing a preferential trade bloc. In this case Trump's hostility to immigration may prove as disastrous. It reverses the remarkable openness that prevailed from the Cellar Act of 1965 for over a half century and contributes to the coarse jingoism that may prove as destructive as its economic impact. It has been the achievement of the postwar liberal era, dating from the Bretton Woods institutions to help elevate the mass subaltern classes as participants in the world economy. Poverty was made visible at an unprecedented rate but migration within and between countries increased. The rich got richer quicker, but as Paul Collier conceded, the "bottom billion" in the world's poorest countries had doubled their daily pittances. Do we dance now on the edge of disaster? And if so, what factors will bring it about? The question is hardly reducible to be asking whether the Trump tariffs (erratic to date) will slow the demand for imports and/or contribute to inflation. The press sometimes seems disappointed that spectacular catastrophe has not yet occurred and tends to assure us that it is to follow imminently. Who will pay the costs -- whether American consumers or foreign producers --depends upon the elasticity of demand for the imports being taxed. As noted, American protectionism in the late 19th century did not deter vast economic expansion and product innovation.

Economic historians during the last generation have taken monetary factors more seriously. Whether the historical contributions of such monetarist economists such as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's detailed Monetary history of the United States, 1867-1960 (Princeton University Press, 1963) with its discussion of flawed contractionary policies on the part of the interwar Federal Reserve, or Barry Eichengreen's splendid book, Golden Fetters (OUP, 1992) argues, the effort to keep currencies at fixed values in terms of gold was disastrous. But this is not Donald Trump's obsession. His policy would ease interest rates quickly and court inflation even if he inconsistently wants the dollar to remain strong. Most of all he wishes to confirm what has been an implicit policy guideline for a long time now: the Dow Jones or S&P standard. Lower interest rates to keep the equity markets strong; raise them when the bond markets falter.

Which brings me to the question of the current manic effort to make money from wagers on the monetary medium itself. The United States under the Trump administration has embarked on a momentous (and perhaps disastrous) economic experiment: the de facto monetization of memes -- what we used to call tokens -- and of Bitcoin, including a Stablecoin assigned a value in terms of the dollar. For Donald Trump they are not coming on stream vigorously enough; he wants to monetize all sorts of memes -- especially the ones his family is offering --and lower the interest rates that the Federal Reserve can control.

The craziness of Bitcoin is not that it is a fiat currency; fiat currency has been with us, and necessarily so, for a long time. The weirdness lies in the paranoid fear that a money dependent on a national Treasury or on bank intermediations was somehow inherently less safe and more intrusive into our personal lives than bitcoin, which requires every accumulation and exchange of bitcoin to be saved unalterably as a long sequence of code on multiple registers (the so-called "blockchain."). The idea was a sort of monetary version of Chairman Mao's disastrous idea of the 1950s that China should produce its steel in small backyard forges and bring their output to regional centers. The consequence is that huge installations of computers are humming away to generate ever more diffused sequences of digits -- making huge demands on electrical power generation -- and the environmental externalities it produces. It does so not to light cities or run transportation systems or smelt metals, but merely to produce numerical sequences that entitle the producer to a bit of exchange value. In theory there was to be a ceiling placed on bitcoins, but there is no reason whole new tranches of the numerical changes cannot be authorized. Now, since most of us cannot buy a bank of number generators, we can buy shares of bitcoin produced by others; and there will be a varying price, hence a speculation on the price of bitcoin as a monetary commodity. Its price should go up forever -- until it doesn't. Crypto capital awaits its Marx.

What constitutes a mania? Can we determine when investors and speculators are participating in one before the speculative bubble bursts and values collapse? I am a historian, not an economist, but the study of speculative behavior lies in the domain of both. Charles P. Kindleberger among others wrote a classic description: Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Basic Books, 1978). The criterion for a mania is that the bidding up of an asset price seems to be fed not by reasonable expectations of future inherent value, nor by a wager on real innovations in technology or productivity or organization, nor by impending scarcity. The market for derivatives -- assets comprised of secondary assets such as traded futures, or insurance policies that protect against adverse price movements of other securities -- such as played a role in the crisis of 2008-2009 -- also expands and rises. Price becomes based purely on the expectation that other investors will continue to bid up prices and one must join the rush to buy lest they lose out in an ebullient market. It is the phase of a rising market that rests primarily on expectations of how the crowd will behave. Finally, a mania, like a Ponzi scheme, requires other investors to jump in to sustain the market: According to the NYT of August 18, investors are becoming nervous about over-valuation of the stock market. Price-earnings ratios have jumped into the 40s.

How does a mania end? For the late-comers: at best with the ordinary losses that one takes in stride as during a visit to a casino. For those who have leveraged themselves to jump in the market, perhaps with disaster as has been the case with previous market crashes such as 1987, 2000-2, and 2008--9. But there is a further price that we all pay. Reducing capitalism to a casino undermines the social compact that makes the system bearable for the millions who live on short rations. Huge wins as well as pervasive losses can be as corrosive to capitalist legitimacy. I am reminded of the moment -- admittedly far from the world of crypto (or is it?) -- in Mozart's Cosí Fan Tutte, in which the cynical arranger Don Alfonso encourages the two heroes to disguise themselves and woo each other's girlfriends to test their fidelity. It seems a lark, but he comments: They laugh now, but tears will follow.