Our Feckless Monarch

A follow-up to "The Banalization of the Exceptional"

Yesterday I wrote about the slow distension of the bond between political speech and social reality that characterizes our current predicament. When what leaders say no longer corresponds to what citizens see, we say that the times are out of joint, that madness reigns. But madness is not our only affliction. We also suffer from a curious fecklessness in high places, as if the people who struggle so mightily to obtain power find its exercise too bothersome to exert themselves, or to divert themselves from the golf course or the new upholstery in the presidential jet.

The latest case in point: the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis thought they had struck a bargain to buy nuclear reactor technology from the United States. This is of course a fraught area of international diplomacy, especially at a time when the United States is engaged in a war with the Saudis’ neighbor Iran, ostensibly to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a nuclear bomb.

Now, there is of course a difference between a reactor and a bomb, but there is also a worrisome family resemblance, not least because the exploitation of nuclear technology for civilian uses necessitates the creation of a community of expertise whose knowledge can easily be shifted from civilian to military use. Since non-proliferation remains a paramount policy goal of the United States, one would expect any agreement to transfer nuclear technology to be accompanied by strict and enforceable controls.

When the lack of such controls in the current agreement was immediately pointed out and contrasted with the terms of previous agreements negotiated by presidents despised by the present one, the response was as bizarre as it was immediate. Rather than seek to remedy the absence of controls, our feckless president announced that “the deal is off” unless the Saudis recognize Israel, as other Arab states did under the so-called “Abraham accords.”

The Saudis must be puzzled. They have in their hands an agreement signed by the American chief of state, which the same chief of state has now repudiated before the ink was even dry. If that is not the very definition of feckless rule, I can’t imagine what is. Pacta sunt servanda, the Saudis may be tempted to protest if they studied Latin: “Agreements must be kept.” But, knowing the feckless and faithless fool with whom they are dealing, they will hold their tongues and try to finesse their way through this embarrassing episode. What they really want out of their reactors is known only to themselves, as are their true intentions toward Israel. But two things are clear: they cannot allow themselves to be “jammed up” by a blundering and incompetent American administration, and they won’t easily relinquish the access to long-coveted knowhow that they believe they have been promised.

As so often, the French, whose venerable monarchy saddled them with a fair number of incompetent rulers, have an expression for feckless kings: rois fainéants. Although the literal meaning of the word fainéant suggests that the problem with such rulers is that they are lazy and do nothing, the real problem is more complicated. It is that, while they do nothing much of the time, they are apt to spasmodically assert their claim to absolute power at the most inopportune moments: after a treaty has been arduously negotiated or when a momentous decision—to wage war, for example, or to grant terms for peace—hangs in the balance.

Trump’s fecklessness has been on abundant display of late. When he realized that Iran could not be pulverized into submission, he pretended to believe that his bombing had effected a regime change in Iran, whose new rulers, unlike the old, were “smart people” who might be amenable to an agreement in exchange for a little baksheesh derived from a sharing of tolls on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. When that fantasy proved to be a will-o’-the-wisp, the threats of war crimes resumed despite the repeated assertion that the enemy was “desperate” to return to the negotiating table.

Trump, as we know, is fond of comparing international relations to a game of cards. What is more feckless, what is more inept, than a poker player who tells an adversary holding three-of-a-kind that he is desperate to fold? You can bluff about your own hand, but you can’t tell your opposite number that he doesn’t actually hold the cards he can see with his own eyes, as can kibitzers the world over.