Is this war a pretext?
“One of the pleasures of talking with a colleague is that we can indulge ourselves a little bit by talking about the past. There’s a long history of this kind of alchemical transfiguration of democracy by way of war.”
Timothy Snyder says this to Ruth Ben-Ghiat in a conversation, and that sentence stopped me: two American historians allowing themselves the luxury of talking about the past precisely while the present is taking a turn that the past can help us recognise. Worth following.
The conversation starts from a simple question — why now? — and from there unfolds along four intersecting axes: war as an autocratic tool, fascism (and its limits, in Trump’s specific case), the psychology of power, and the concrete possibilities of resistance, both institutional and from below.
Snyder is clear from the outset: under international law, the war against Iran is a crime of aggression. The fact that the president was able to mobilise the armed forces without going through Congress is not a procedural overreach — it is a constitutional rupture. Ben-Ghiat adds a comparative perspective: autocrats go to war for personal survival, not for reasons of state, and the “Venezuela model” gave the American administration the illusion that it could replicate a lightning operation on an incomparably larger scale, without a deep understanding of the differences in scenario and the potential risks of the conflict spreading across the entire Middle East.
Ben-Ghiat: War can be an option if an autocrat feels he’s vulnerable at home — maybe popularity is declining, corruption is becoming more blatant, people are disaffected — and often you have an impulse as an autocrat to launch some kind of military action that can both give you the possibility to have special powers arrogated to yourself, states of emergency. Also, it’s supposed to be unifying. So we always want to ask: why now?
Snyder: I think we’re in a very specific variant where all the symptoms you describe are there. But I’m not sure that it’s going to work in the traditional rallying-of-the-population kind of way. […] So there’s a war with Iran, or maybe it’ll be Cuba by November, but for now it’s Iran. And therefore we can’t have normal elections. Therefore we have to take precautions. Therefore we have to do a kind of sneaky, passive-aggressive regime change.
**Ben-Ghiat: **Yes. I talked with Anne Applebaum yesterday and we were talking about what she called the oddity of this. […] Even Mussolini, when he decided to go to Ethiopia, there was a whole propaganda buildup, even where you don’t have elections and you don’t care, in theory, what people think. We didn’t see this this time. There was no consensus building because that’s not what it’s about.
**Snyder: **We are at war, and it is pretty obviously an illegal war of aggression. […] It’s also a war not conducted according to any American legal norm. Congress hasn’t declared war. There’s this weird notion — which sounds very Russian — that we’re not even going to call it a war. We’re going to call it a special military operation.
If the executive can just do what he wants with the armed forces, we are already in a kind of constitutional disaster. […] I think the main thing he’s afraid of this year is the Republicans getting clobbered in November. He’s right to be afraid of it. But because he talks so much, he just makes it transparently obvious that he’s the kind of guy who would start a war to rig an election.
After an instructive — and rather entertaining — digression on the fact that Trump and his circle lack the popularity, the competence and the attention span required to be fascists in any meaningful sense, Snyder returns to the more concrete risk: the federalisation of the November elections using the war as a pretext. How do we respond, how do we resist?
This is where Ben-Ghiat says something worth holding onto:
When does it break? When does a real movement emerge? It’s when the structures and constituencies that support the regime start to have internal instability. You need movements within the structures that support the regime, as well as from below. […] Ultimately, the change comes from below. We can be out there in our myriad ways of resisting and being competent. Opposing the contradictions and hypocrisies in a non-judgmental way to people still in the disinformation tunnel. This kind of civic education is really important. Both of us have predicted lots of things, and we don’t have crystal balls — we see patterns, personalities, structures, and the way things work when there’s a stressor like a war. It’s disheartening to see history repeating itself, but in our case we’re also trying to have people be informed so they can react and help to mitigate the disaster. If someone is acting against the interests of the nation, it is patriotic to engage in resistance — in whatever peaceful, nonviolent form works for you.
You’ll find the full video here: