Who benefits from the President of the United States provoking useless wars from which he also comes out defeated, as has happened in Iran? Which magnates are interested in Trump continuing to distract the world with his childish antics?
Presidents are usually surrounded by advisors, hundreds or thousands of them, professionals who give opinions, conduct surveys, and manage affairs. The more independent they are, the more credible and valuable their work is. Professionalism and sincerity, however, are not good companions of power. Hence, presidents prefer advisors who are more loyal than professional, submissive people who do not challenge them.
Read more A conflict with echoes of the independentist ‘procés’
This acquiescence seems necessary because power, even when exercised with the best intention, is at odds with morality. What must be done must be done, and there are no easy decisions. Almost all have undesirable consequences.
Advisors and officials form the bureaucracy, the organization that makes it possible for political ideas to be transformed into tangible services and rights. Their role is fundamental. The quality of a democracy depends on the quality of its bureaucracy. If it only serves power and neglects the general interest, the system weakens. If this service to power involves the improper appropriation of public goods, then the damage to coexistence is tremendous. Spain suffers this frequently. Corruption seems engraved in its social DNA.
The decline of liberal democracies has much to do with the collapse of bureaucracy, disinterested advising, and diplomacy.
Corruption, cynicism, and authoritarianism go hand in hand, then. The citizenry loses trust in the ruler and he, facing the decline of his popularity, surrounds himself with even more flatterers. He has plenty to choose from. Suitors are not lacking. The corridors of power are full of unscrupulous opportunists. That is why the system erects legal and bureaucratic barriers against them. A president who cannot control his collaborators is a failed leader. To the loneliness inherent in power, he must add the betrayal and greed of those who intended to help him.
No democratic leader can survive under these circumstances. Even if he is an intelligent and sound person, his government is no longer trustworthy. His only option to retain power is to become a dictator. If he does, he will still be alone, but he will be feared and able to do whatever he wants, even war. If the escalation of democracy is toward dictatorship, that of dictatorship is toward war.
Trump detests bureaucracy because it is a great barrier against authoritarianism
The great temptations of any ruler are personal enrichment, cult of personality, and authoritarianism. Donald Trump has fallen into these three and also into war. If democracy were a religion, he would be the paradigm of the sinner. There is no more dangerous ruler.
Just look at the disaster he has caused in Iran to understand it. Before the war, Hormuz was a strait of free navigation. Today it is an economic weapon of mass disruption in the hands of an immoral regime. Iran controls the passage of 20% of the oil that moves the world and the U.S. cannot prevent it. The shockwave of this power opens a hole in the pockets of families in industrialized countries and that is why the deterrent capacity of the ayatollahs today is much greater than Trump’s. There is no diplomatic agreement or military force that can change this reality.
Read more No one dares to take on the motion
Trump could have avoided defeat if he had trusted the good advisors of his administration, but he has fired almost all of them. He does not want them because bureaucracy, the deep state, as he himself disdainfully calls it, would stop him and he could not make war.
War sustains the authoritarian leader, as long as he can sustain it. It is not necessary to come out victorious. It is enough to eternalize it. That is what Putin does in Ukraine, Netanyahu in Palestine, and the ayatollahs with Israel.
Trump is also subscribed to eternal violence, but he is a dictator apprentice. The republic still stands and in July it will turn 250 years old. Freedom of expression, for example, still stands, and it is this freedom, the freedom of speech, that prevents him from camouflaging the defeat in Iran with a pact that is worthless and grandiloquent rhetoric. When he does, only his acolytes will believe him. That he sinks in his ineptitude, that he must parade naked until the end of his term, is bad news because the temptation of evil is even greater in the scorned leader.
The defeat in Iran ruins Trump’s future, but not that of the technologists who support him
Having reached this failure, we could ask who benefits from Trump remaining in the White House. Xi, Putin, and Netanyahu are doing well. Also Kim Yong Un, who has built 20 more atomic bombs since seven years ago when he promised to denuclearize and today is a much greater threat to the world than the ayatollahs. Likewise, there are hundreds of Republican politicians who still trust to be reelected thanks to his charisma.
Above all of them, however, are the artificial intelligence technologists. These magnates, the richest men in the U.S., need time, money, and free rein—exactly what the president gives them without limit—to create the digital agents that will manage much of human activity in the near future.
When the Pope and the EU warn of the danger of this technology, Trump accuses them of weakness and bombs Iran again, as has happened this very week. But our future does not pass through Hormuz, but through AI laboratories.
Disorienting the present with wars, fascisms, and golden borders distracts us from the real struggle to dominate the world, exactly what the technologists who back Trump want.
Read more A conflict with echoes of the independentist ‘procés’
