State of exception
David Klion on Trump, the War on Terror, and the national security consensus
“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” President Trump posted on Truth Social alongside his announcement that U.S. planes had bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities on the night of June 21. (“Thank you for your attention to the matter,” he concluded.) In the week that followed, critics and allies emerged from various corners; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Trump’s apparent pivot toward interventionism a “complete bait and switch,” while Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat, said Trump was “right” to bomb Iran.
The airstrikes, and the bipartisan support for them, led many to wonder whether we were seeing a rerun of the lead-up to the War on Terror. Debate was reignited over whether Trump represents continuity with or deviation from the Cold War national security consensus. In our latest issue, David Klion contextualizes Trump’s approach to moments of crisis by revisiting an idea formulated by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. “The Cold War establishment long envisioned a world governed by universal liberal norms,” Klion writes, “but also granted the American sovereign the ability to ‘decide on the exception,’ as Schmitt put it, suspending those rules in cases of emergency. In his second term, Trump has embraced the model of the Schmittian exception, but he has also made clear his lack of interest in ever returning to normalcy.”
State of Exception | National Security Governance, Then and Now
DAVID KLION
If Cold Warriors and their post-9/11 successors envisioned the imperial president as Cincinnatus, who assumed the Roman dictatorship in moments of crisis and then relinquished that power when the crises abated, Trump instead sees himself more in the vein of Julius Caesar: dictator for life.
Here we go again-another "thoughtful" analysis of somebody who hasn't the foggiest idea of who Cincinnatus or Julius Caesar was and couldn't care less. Our intrepid leader is a high-functioning embecilic schoolyard loudmouth whose main ambition in getting reelected was to stay out of prison-everything else was just how many cookies he could steal. NATO needs to realize that while this peculiar pandemic is sweeping America, the rest of
the Free 1st World is on its own, full stop.
The small silver lining here is that our lad
has the attention span of a 3 year old and about as much interest in greater world at large- thus, whatever ideas about talking over Greenland or 6 Flags Over Gaza he might spout off about have a very short half life. As far as getting out of this mess
goes, that depends on whether American
voters insist on being the same all-day suckers they were in '24. Coin toss from
where I'm sitting...