Book of Revelation

 

"Standing before you today, I am the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent World War III," Trump said, sparking extended applause from the crowd. "Because I really believe you're going to have World War III."

Let's suppose that in his completely private conversations with Putin while he was president Trump proposed a US - Russia alliance against China. Do you think that's unlikely? Perhaps. Would Putin have humored him without taking the proposal seriously? Possibly. 

Of course no one here has evidence of what was discussed. And even if, in a show of bravado, Trump were to wave a clutch of documents and tell such a story to some confidant at one of his golf clubs why would anyone believe him?

But I have a feeling something of that nature is behind his boast above along with his claim to be able to resolve the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of retaking office. Although the proclamation gets applause it's hard to imagine it's taken seriously by more than a handful in the audience and, certainly, by no one in the rooms where the determinations of actual American global strategy are made. 

While this handful may follow the rabbit down its hole to be joined by those who adhere to a madman theory of nuclear deterrence, for his larger audience it will bring to mind less the world balance of power than a prophetic tradition that is far more familiar to them than to Trump. They will grasp that he is, mindful of the fact or not, reading from the Book of Revelation. 

It hardly matters that Armageddon is a comfort for them and not something which needs to be prevented. The connection between his political boast and their theological anxiety is the identity of nuclear weaponry with the end of the world, an identity already present at their first detonation. Before he became president Trump likely never gave a thought to nuclear war and I'm not sure what his thinking on it is now. Declaring it a problem he would solve in office does not distinguish it from any other subject. But its inclusion in his speech is a change from his previous campaigns.

I read a lot of science fiction in the eighth grade, which is also when I read the Book of Revelation. The story fits well into the sci-fi trope of an imperial hinterland in rebellion against its empire. How that trope reads at present will depend on where one is located in the global economy. For American readers that will often have a paradoxical result. 

Empires draw a boundary around a home territory, then a colonial one, and, finally, one divided into allies and enemies. They are defined by these territories but the work of empires is to negate the limits of territory by the extraction of wealth. In the fully developed capitalism which we all inhabit wealth may continue to originate geographically but it is not everywhere required to and, even when it is, it hurries to wash itself clean of its soil. So while America is beyond doubt such a home territory, a first among equals, its wealth is on the wind to a degree never seen before. It is the historic sponsor of the very system by which capital floats free of earthly bonds. 

In the political crisis that has summoned Trump the American landscape has cracked between its financial centers and the countryside which hosted slave agriculture along with that which is devoted to the extraction of natural resources. Those regions, at an economic distance from city markets and adhering to the ways of old, have reacted to change by inverting their view of power. For them the commanding heights of the world economy are no longer American. They no longer share the religious and capitalist virtues that directed the construction of an international market. 

Those heights cannot plead innocent to alienation, it’s their business. Although it shouldn’t, it seems to surprise those at the top when their system, established to protect private ownership of the means of production, is attacked by a variety of sovereign ideologies for conspiring to institute global socialism. These opponents are detached, perhaps permanently, from the two party concord of the last three quarters of a century. This separation has not occurred, so far, on the left but on the right where its persistence is fed by its claim to the fundamental myths of American politics. It is a position that has been able to challenge the old direction of their party and, to a large extent, eliminate it. The tocsin of decline and fall has deafened them to the summons to preserve national security which has always served the right against the left. How has the GOP been induced to abandon the structures of strategic nuclear power? What is being made visible by the ideological shift that so much of received opinion finds so perplexing?

WWII ended with the US having a militarily plausible claim to history’s first global empire. It would not be an empire with a horizon beyond which dwelt only the unimportant. This one would be bound only by the willingness to use the new weapon. After it was used to obtain the surrender of imperial Japan that willingness remained a part of American militarism but the political impetus behind the Manhattan Project was redirected toward accumulating more and better weapons and exploding them out of sight. 

In time the duplication of the technology by the Soviets and then others ended the opportunity to lay claim to the entire world. But that dispensation, the anointing of a universal empire, was not forgotten. It has survived in the political subconscious as the rightful inheritance by America of a worldwide domination that abides no limitations from enemies, from allies, and, particularly, from the masses outside its borders.

Since that time the two party administration of the American empire assured its political homeland and allies of its ability to maintain peace and economic growth. In the Democratic Party this was expressed as a collaboration between the classes. In the GOP collaboration was disdained as an unnecessary cost for a perfect market. But this grand ideological assurance, even as it continued to accumulate capital, also accumulated political and economic crises. And now a permanent state of crisis is widely visible as the relentless ecological disaster of climate change compounds the periodic economic shocks of global production.

In the GOP this is expressed as a territorial threat, an invasion with the covert support of not only the majority party but of those in its own ranks who have held to the old understanding of strategic alliances. The sovereign citizens at its base paradoxically reject the capitalist empire which their party has always protected. They are not critical of it. They reject criticism. Criticism and politics are the tools available to humanity to overcome its crisis with something new. But for Trump and his reactive audience crushing the new is the point. For them the third world war has begun. It is a civil war and it is Armageddon.

Unlike his audience Trump was granted, for a time, a daily briefing. For previous postwar American presidents it was an education. For Trump, limited in background and in spirit, it was a source of confusion. He is one with his audience as they take up arms against their enemies at home but he misunderstands his own role when he claims that he can prevent a third world war. They want him to herald the end times, not prevent them.