To paraphrase the American essayist H. L. Mencken, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Every populist is acutely aware of this, carefully and gradually erasing the final, yet crucial, part of the equation from public consciousness. What remains are only fast, simple, and entirely wrong solutions that do not solve complex global problems, but conversely—amplify them. And based on this, they rush to offer the exact same recipes again, which for the collateral masses usually means a simultaneous descent through Dante’s circles of hell.
It is a similar story with Trump’s latest adventure in Iran, which has neither a beginning nor an even more desperately needed exit strategy. It is not enough to merely say that the US-Israeli operation is entirely illegitimate under international law (just as the Russian aggression against Ukraine is), because it is crystal clear that Trump & Co. will not be held accountable for this, neither politically nor in any other way. Or, to say that this is nothing new, since we are already accustomed to unilateral and illegitimate American military interventions, and it was no different in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Despite all the similarities, we are dealing with something new—for years, American hawks built a narrative, tailored evidence, and tried to drag as many Western allies as possible into the Iraqi adventure. Including Slovenia. Legitimacy, or at least the appearance of it, was apparently important. With Trump 2.0, everything is different: no brakes, no need for any legitimacy. Chaos is the new normal, and fast, simple solutions are the means to achieve it.
Do the US even have a strategy behind this new Middle Eastern episode? Or is it merely a theater of the absurd that is becoming increasingly unwatchable and indigestible? Namely, in the attempts to justify the latest US-Israeli attacks on Iran, there is so much nonsense that even the most prominent artists of Russian absurdism—one of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century—would not be ashamed of it. Trump would simultaneously be a peacemaker and the global sheriff, answering to no one but his own conscience (no, not even God).
According to high-ranking representatives of the Trump administration, Iran had to be attacked; otherwise, Iran would have attacked first. Or, an even better version: Iran would have responded to the Israeli attack, and therefore it had to be preemptively incapacitated. Where in all this is the story from a few months ago, claiming that the US and Israel effectively destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, which consequently can no longer pose any threat in the region? And so on… Trying to find a logical sequence of cause and effect in all this is like reading a grotesque or science fiction novel through the lens of literary realism. Again, it simply doesn’t work. You will either close the book, or it will drive you crazy. But unlike a book, which we can simply close and put on a shelf to gather dust, unfortunately, this is not the case with global wars; unless we are all Elon Musks. We only have one planet.
Perhaps it is neither a grand American strategy nor absurdity, but something far deeper, something unconscious. What if Trump is projecting his manic desire for the Nobel Peace Prize in the only authentic way he knows—through war—and is simply meeting his destiny in the process? You know, much like in the famous Oriental parable where a wealthy merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the market for groceries. The servant soon returns, pale as a ghost: “Master, a woman in the crowd bumped into me at the market. When I turned around, I saw it was Death. She gave me a dirty look. Please, lend me a horse so I can flee to Damascus, where she won’t find me.” The merchant lends him a horse, and the servant rides off as fast as he can. Then the merchant goes to the market himself, finds Death, and asks: “Why did you frighten my servant and give him such a dirty look?” Death replies: “That wasn’t a dirty look, but merely an expression of surprise at seeing him here in Baghdad, for I have an appointment to meet him tonight in Damascus.” Is Trump that same servant, running away from war only to meet it (and himself) over and over again?
But we do not have a problem with perceiving reality only across the Atlantic, although many in Europe would mockingly like to believe so. The zeitgeist is very much present within the EU and in the country on the sunny side of the Alps. A few days ago, I read with astonishment about a new dispute between France and Germany over the development of a next-generation joint military fighter jet, the so-called FCAS project, worth a cool 100 billion euros. You know, following the successful Airbus model and in the spirit of European armament, preferably with ‘Made in the EU’ equipment. All well and good, but the moment something goes wrong, nationalisms of all kinds—conscious and subconscious—quickly bubble to the surface in Europe.
And so it is here, as Germany and France suddenly realized they have different views on the needs of their respective armies. A political and industrial conflict ensued, quickly leading Éric Trappier, the CEO of the French aviation giant Dassault Aviation, to state: “If they [the Germans/Airbus] want to do everything themselves, let them do it themselves. But we know how to build a combat aircraft from A to Z. We have been proving this for more than seventy years. We have all the necessary knowledge and skills.” Trappier’s “let them do it themselves” thus became a prime example of that fast and simple—yet for Europe, in the long run, entirely wrong—solution. The Gallic roosters have spoken: they demand nothing special, except one “small” thing—control over the program. For, freely quoting Trappier: “In terms of leadership, I will not accept three of us sitting around a table deciding on all the technical solutions needed to make the plane fly. I want the best athlete to lead.”
Of course, no one is asking who this ‘best athlete’ is in the games of the small—because in today’s world, even the largest European countries are small on their own. That is an open secret. Not to mention the common good, unity, unified programs, and all the other possible declared values of the EU. Hearing this, one doesn’t need to ask whether we have learned anything from the Russian aggression against Ukraine or Trump’s project to dismantle the EU. The answer is obvious, freely quoting Mr. Trappier.
And so we come to Slovenia, which is in its final electoral sprint. True, global circumstances and foreign policy usually do not decide Slovenian governments; the partisan-Home Guard leitmotif simply has a stronger mobilizing force. But the collapsing world order cannot be entirely bypassed, and thus the Trump-Netanyahu alliance has provided a dash of more dynamic electoral debate. In this debate, an extremely pronounced contradiction can be observed, which, in the spirit of the tradition of self-deception or utopian denial of reality, the main political actors still cannot (or will not) recognize, let alone transcend.
Namely, only a masochist can enjoy watching representatives of the Slovenian right sweat as they try to rhetorically avoid clearly labeling what Trump & Co. are doing. In this, of course, the image of the criminal theocratic regime of the Iranian ayatollahs certainly comes in handy, for many will say—the death of a tyrant is only good news. The broader context—from Venezuela to threats to the territorial integrity of the EU regarding Greenland—does not particularly worry them. The argumentation is simple: the US does what it can; who cares what a country like Slovenia or Slovenians think about it, we will just have to find a path of dialogue and cooperate with the US anyway. Sound familiar? What about Russia, which, much like Trump 2.0, envisions its own spheres of interest within which it can do whatever it pleases? And does so in the broader region that includes Slovenia? Oh, please, that’s a different matter. Russia is an authoritarian old Soviet creature, and Putin is a KGB man who miscalculated in Ukraine. He needs to be stopped there. Trump? Ah, Trump is just Trump—unpredictable, but the US is the US.
But on the left—perhaps not absolutely everyone, but very, very many—they face a similar predicament. Broadly and very loudly (which does not mean clearly), we hear criticism of the US and Trump. Meanwhile, much more reservedly, quietly, and with fingers crossed behind their backs, they observe the actions of Putin, who simply cannot get enough… Not of Ukrainian territory, not of freedom of thought and expression, nor of the block of countries called the EU. And who yearns for historical revisionism, much like Trump yearns for his “peacemaking destiny.” But if the US is firmly anchored in this camp as a “capitalist empire” that maintains hegemony with military force, Russia holds the image of a force that is its antipode; one that might be violating international law and suppressing everyone around it, but is a historical counterweight to American hegemony, and therefore we can forgive it many things. You see, Russia may have violated international law with its aggression against Ukraine, but… And that quiet “but” is ominously loud.
So, what are we left with? The way out of all these predicaments is obvious—let’s find another fast, simple, and entirely wrong solution.