Peace deal: Trump’s Iran gambit (1)

Oxford—“[I]f you were to take account of everything [you would end up] never do[ing] anything,” declared the Persian Emperor Xerxes shortly before unleashing his million-strong army in Europe. “[It is always] better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [anticipate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing [in the actual world] at all,” he confidently told his able adviser, Artabanus, who expressed apprehensions about the ultimately ill-fated campaign against the remaining independent polities in the Greek world. Dazed with oozing self-confidence, the Persian emperor maintained that ultimately “[b]ig things are won by big dangers.”

In fairness, Xerxes’ oozing self-confidence wasn’t built out of thin air. In the words of Yale Professor Amy Chua, Achaemenid Persia was no ordinary empire, since it met the classic definition of a ”hyperpower”: namely, a highly centralized and sophisticated authority, which “clearly surpasses that of all its known contemporaneous rivals; it is not clearly inferior in economic or military strength to any other power on the planet, known to it or not; and it projects its power over so immense an area of the globe and over so immense a population that it breaks the definition of mere local or even regional preeminence.”

Little did Xerxes—who had inherited an imperial realm extending from South Asia and Central Asia to Southeastern Europe and North Africa—know about the world-historical consequences of his rash war. His seemingly invincible military juggernaut proved unable to overpower the increasingly unified and nimble Greek city-states led by Sparta. Though the Achaemenid Empire would live on for several generations more, the Persian defeat at the hands of Greek underdogs laid the foundation for the rise of the Delian League under Athens, which, in turn, challenged Sparta for Hellenic supremacy in the devastating Peloponnesian War. What began as Xerxes’ imperial excursion—or, more accurately, a megalomaniac ego-trip—ended up marking the beginning of the end for the first world empire. From an unquestioned hegemon at the crossroads of Asia, Europe, and Africa, Persia was steadily reduced to a marginal player in Mediterranean geopolitics and was, eventually, absorbed by the once-marginal colony of Macedonia under Alexander the Great.

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The eerie similarities between Xerxes and United States President Donald Trump are unmistakable. A self-styled “stable genius,” Trump has also often spoken of the wisdom of bold, big action. In the “Art of the Deal,” he nonchalantly boasted: “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.” Both Xerxes and Trump also fit German sociologist Max Weber’s definition of “charismatic” leaders, namely seemingly extraordinary men/women who, in the eyes of their followers, are “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Both Xerxes and Trump also reflect British philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s classic definition of the “hedgehog” personality type, namely someone who can “relate everything to a single central vision, one system, more or less coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.”

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So, is Trump the ”modern Xerxes”? Will his failed war against, ironically, contemporary Persians spell the end of the American empire? Not necessarily.

First of all, contrary to conventional wisdom about Trump’s supposed radical unpredictability, the reality is that the US President is actually quite consistent on the most fundamental level. As Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution observed, Trump has been consistent with his triple grievances of “unhapp[iness] with America’s military alliances and feeling that the United States is overcommitted around the world … that America is disadvantaged by the global economy … [and his] sympathetic [attitude] to authoritarian strongmen [overseas].”

Even more crucially, Trump happens to also fit Berlin’s definition of the fox personality type, namely “[some]one who knows many things” and is willing to improvise and embrace tactical adjustments as new situations arise. After two major wars against Tehran, Trump seems to have finally realized that the best way to preserve Pax Americana is to pursue, against all odds, a mutually acceptable peace deal with modern Persia.

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