What Machiavelli Should Teach Trump on Iraq
Trump is often called Machiavellian. He isn’t, but when it comes to his treatment of Iraq, the president could stand to take some of the advice Machiavelli gives in his famous treaty, The Prince.
The advice Machiavelli gives his prototypical sketch of a “good ruler” is built around one simple principle: stability. Power is centralized in the hands of an absolute ruler, but one whose excesses are nominally checked by the people. One cannot rule if one has been swept from office by a violent uprising: therefore, favor must be curried, even if rights are not respected in the same way we are accustomed to today.
Machiavelli’s leader, therefore, is bound by natural law, as much as by political guidelines. As a result, the most fundamental of human laws—survival—is predominant in the advice Machiavelli gives. For example, Machiavelli warns that a prince must exercise caution in his desire to conquer new lands, for:
“a new prince must always offend his new subjects with both his soldiers and other countless injuries that accompany his new conquest; thus, you have made enemies of all those you injured in occupying the principality and you are unable to maintain as friends those who helped you to rise to power since you cannot satisfy them in the way that they had supposed.” (The Prince, Ch. III, trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa)
Machiavelli’s maxim here is simple: don’t bite the hand that feeds you, lest you endanger your own survival. This idea would soon be crystallized into the natural law philosophy that underlies social contract theory. As Locke notes in The Second Treatise of Government:
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health liberty, or possessions.” (The Second Treatise of Government, Chapter II)
There’s a common theme here: respect for the rights of others that springs from a desire to prolong one’s own being. Machiavelli, as he’s speaking of royalty, obviously isn’t emphasizing “equal and independent” creation in a political sense, but its natural connotation plays an important role in his philosophy of government.
Machiavelli incorporate the states and laws of nature, investing supreme power in the hand of one man. But despite the physical limitations of nature being lifted by merging man and state, Machiavelli recognizes that the laws of nature cannot be transcended: hence the need for his prince to exercise restraint and look to the laws of preservation in his actions.
What, you might well wonder, does this have to do with Trump and American policy towards Iraq?
For one, Trump’s mercurial blustering belies the emphasis Machiavelli places on stability, which helps to show he is not Machiavelli’s ideal prince. Though Trump campaigned on dovish foreign policy—bragging about how he would ignore the advice of generals and end America’s long-standing Middle East entanglements—his America First rhetoric has made him into a liar. (Yet another quality Machiavelli warns must be avoided at all costs.) After Iraq’s Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution recommending the Iraqi prime minister expel U.S. troops, Trump responded by threatening the country with sanctions:
“If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”
Given that Iran is the country Trump’s administration is supposedly interested in curbing (hence the strike on Qassem Suleimeni), this response makes no sense. It clouds the issue of who America consider their enemy. Killing Sulemeimeni was supposedly as much a boon to America’s Iraqi allies as it was a domestic victory. Or, at least, that’s what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed in an interview on Fox News Sunday: “As for the activity today with respect to Iraq, we've been in their country. We've been supporting Iraqi sovereignty. We've been continuing to take down the terrorist threat against the Iraqi people.”
Foreign policy hawks like Pompeo beat their puffed-up chests and crow about the dangers of a premature exit from Iraq. They paint a dark picture: of instability and chaos and the collapsing of a regime without the benevolent support of the American armed forces.
Would, they ask, the relative greater loss of life likely to result from a political vacuum created by American withdrawal, be worse than the comparatively minor destruction of tit-for-tat minor skirmishes: the death of an American contractor here, the wiping out of a terrorist cell there? The conclusion they obviously want American citizens to arrive at is: yes, it would be.
And here’s where Machiavelli becomes relevant. In The Prince, Machiavelli warns that while an act on its face may appear merciful, if it prolongs suffering, it is actually cruel:
“a prince must not worry about the reproach of cruelty when it is a matter of keeping his subjects united and loyal; for with a very few examples of cruelty he will be more compassionate than those who, out of excessive mercy, permit disorders to continue, from which arise murders and plundering.” (The Prince, Ch. XVII, trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa)
Here Machiavelli marries morality to the more colloquial idea that it’s better to rip a bandage off quickly and avoid pain that lingers. For the American interests Trump loves to champion, then, it’s worth considering that withdrawal, chaotic as it’s likely to become, is in our best interests. While it’s hard to call any action likely to result in the spilling of blood “moral,” it’s certainly impossible to call anything that prolongs the likelihood of spilling blood “moral.”
American generals and presidents need to awaken to this reality.
This, though, is the barbarous morality of a too-powerful government, wherein power is centralized in the hands of an executive. Trump inherited an office that behaves in this way, and his behavior certainly signals his desire to assume the mantle of this kind of leadership. It is therefore his responsibility to awaken to the kind of conscientiousness Machiavelli (not quite the cheerleader for despotism popular culture would have you believe) recognizes as integral to the success of this kind of leader. Trump’s brand of populism claims that the welfare of citizens is dependent upon broad social conditions: political actions affect the infrastructure of business; the success of individuals depends on the health of the infrastructure as a whole. Therefore, sometimes people have to sacrifice for “the greater good.” Hence Trump’s ludicrous trade war. But if he’s going to adopt this attitude, he needs to well and truly understand that arguing that freedom depends on stability at home and abroad means making choices that truly take this into account. Thus, the importance of Machiavelli’s maxim that kindness that prolongs suffering is cruelty, which ought to be taken account in Trump’s policy towards Iraq.