Society rises in ethical indignation from time to time. As time passes the outrage dies and normalisation sets in.
Take the example of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell in 1996. In the immediate aftermath there was an outpouring of ethical outrage. A few years later cloning has become routine and normal.
This normalisation takes hard and dedicated work. Intellectuals, academics, writers, think tanks and advocacy groups work hard at establishing “common sense” about what is considered normal.
When the US invaded the sovereign country of Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicholas Maduro, there were mild objections from Europe and more vociferous outrage in the rest of the world.
Yet within a couple of weeks the outrage has quietened down. Within a day or two of the invasion and kidnapping intellectuals organically part of the North Atlantic community — notably the Atlantic Council and The Economist — presented everything that had happened as somehow unproblematic, even normal. US President Donald Trump hardly missed a beat in going on to threaten to take control of Greenland.
There is every possibility that the Europeans will appease Trump on this issue. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has already tightened his grip on Trump’s pinkie as they saunter through a global schoolyard that is verging on chaos. Social psychologists explain “siding with the bully” as a means to seem important and relevant.
A remilitarising Germany stands firmly by the side of the US, especially on Palestine. It’s all linked in a chain of events unfolding while the world is “dancing on a volcano,” as Ian Kershaw described the period before World War 2.
For the moment there is little structural (international) or material resistance to Trump’s aspirant imperium. Trump has declared that the US was “in charge” and nobody dares to, or has the capacity to, fight back.
So how can Trump and his expansive imperium be stopped? Bodies that constitute the UN system and that preside over international laws — conventions, treaties, principles and rules — have become increasingly ineffectual over the past quarter century.
It is difficult to see a solution beyond the threat of force. Consider that on March 31 1939 Britain and France explicitly stated that if Germany invaded Poland they would declare war. The US and Soviet Union would later join the war against the Nazis.
Today we can make the argument that China and its allies may want to step in to secure peace before the Europeans take the world (back) to what Kershaw described as “hell on earth” after 1939.
There will no doubt be resistance to that idea because China and Russia are considered to be imperfect (liberal capitalist) democracies. But pretty much the same can be said about the US and Soviet Union in 1939.
With particular reference to the US (today), Anne Applebaum, a US historian and author of Autocracy Inc, glibly glossed over the US as a “flawed democracy and so on” in the Influencing History Arts episode of the BBC’s Arts & Ideas podcast on December 5. She went on to make arguments about “us” and “them” on her TikTok page. This is consistent with the efforts of organic intellectuals to define and secure what is normal.
Arguments against war generally rest on pacifism, with the weak “suffering what they must” or the belief that war is bad for business…. The Applebaum consideration is that “we” need to fight for what made “us” prosperous.
Never mind. What lies before anyone who would try to stop Trump is the Aristotelian observation (in The Politics) that for anyone to win a hot or cold war they would have to make sure they win the peace that follows. Herein lies any challenge to Trump’s imperium.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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