CARPE'ING THE DIEM
MAKING THE MOST OF THE HISTORICAL MOMENT
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene iii
Last week, two important dates that occupied the minds of many appalled by the onslaught of the Trump regime’s second incarnation passed.
The first was the idea of “53 Days”. For the Atlantic-reading, Timothy Snyder-sharing segment of the anti-Trump forces this was a milestone to be feared;
For weeks a fear had stalked those areas of social media where the well-educated hang out trying to scare each other to death. In their view, our Führer, Donald Trump, would shred the constitution and declare himself dictator for life. He may aspire to it, but as noted in earlier newsletters he doesn’t want to do the work necessary to make that happen.
Anyway, by last Friday, Day 53, the Reichstag hadn't burned, an Enabling Act wasn't passed, an equivalent to Dachau had yet to be opened. Americans could still say whatever they wanted (green card holders at Columbia University excepted) & could still peaceably assemble "to petition the government for political redress," or shout at MAGA congressmen if they preferred.
Hopefully we can leave the Nazi analogies behind for a while (I use them too, tough to give up, but our mess is our own not Germany’s nearly a hundred years ago.)
The latter date that passed by this week is alluded to in the Shakespeare quote: the Ides of March, the assassination of Julius Caesar. Another obvious historical analogy for America’s current calamity is the process by which Rome went from being a Republic that oversaw an empire to a monarchy in charge of an empire. We should probably leave this analogy alone for a bit as well, but it is hard to resist.
The “tides in the affairs of men” being taken at the flood was on my mind already before social media reminded me that it was the Ides.
Shortly after the fiasco in the Oval Office on February 28th, when Trump and Vance bullied Volodomyr Zelensky live on television, leaders of European NATO members began to openly discuss a separate Europe-wide policy for Ukraine that went beyond providing financial support to the beleaguered nation but also military assistance from outside the NATO structure.
BBC Radio 4 then commissioned me to make a documentary for the Archive on 4 slot that would be not just a history of NATO but also a look at earlier attempts by European countries to set up an alternative security apparatus. I’m calling the program, “NATO: Then, Now, Now What?”
Archive on 4 is built around actuality from the BBC’s vast news and current affairs sound archive as well as other internet and personal sources. I spent a chunk of last week going through my own work from the early 1990s. One of my beats for NPR was covering the unsuccessful diplomacy to prevent the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Several things stood out as I went through the transcripts and listened to long out of public life (and life itself in some cases) political leaders.
First, the uniqueness of the moment. The Bosnian War began as Europe’s politicians were trying to seize the opportunities presented by the fall of the Berlin Wall while avoiding the dangers of the subsequent and equally sudden end of the Soviet Union.
This contributed to the inability of the main powers in Europe — Britain, France and Germany — agreeing on virtually any approach to solving the problem of former Yugoslavia as it exploded into a bloody crisis.
Difficult to think of solving Balkan blood feuds when you are busy negotiating the reunification of Germany, deepening economic and political ties in a new treaty (what would become the Maastricht Treaty), and delineating a path to EU and eventually NATO membership for the former Warsaw pact nations, all while taking care of the usual domestic politics so you can win the next election.
Then there was Germany’s odd role in both precipitating the crisis and having little to do with its military resolution. After the fall of the Wall, Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, ethnic and sectarian-based for the most part, began to pull away from one another. Britain, France, and the US all wanted to keep Yugoslavia together until, at the least, a negotiated resolution could lead to an orderly break up.
Germany had previous bad history in the Balkans during the World Wars yet it was German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher who pushed the pace of break-up by indicating his country would recognize Slovenia and Croatia. Coming so soon after German re-unification, Genscher and Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s more or less unilateral decision set off alarm bells. A united Germany, now the most populous and richest country in Europe, was already throwing its weight around. Just like the bad old days.
But the previous bad history in the Balkans kept German soldiers out of UN and later NATO peacekeeping forces.
Genscher saw the tide was at the flood and seized the moment. The people of Slovenia and Croatia remain grateful. The people of Bosnia curse his name
But the main thing my troll through the past reminded me was how difficult it was for individual European nation states — despite their overlapping membership of NATO and the EU — to patch together some kind of unified response to a crisis that had displaced around 2 million people, many of whom became refugees in Western European countries.
And in the current crisis, once again a German politician is out in front. Last week, seizing his moment, incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz, got the Green Party to agree to break budget rules and set Germany on a path towards massive increases in defense spending.
The final thing that stood out as I went through the archives is how important the fate of Ukraine was to NATO and the EU in this same period. This was because one-third of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal was based in Ukraine, making the newly independent country the world’s third largest nuclear power. Ukraine’s leadership signed the Budapest Memorandum giving up the arsenal in return for security guarantees from the West. Security guarantees that have proven to be not terribly robust.
That period between 1991-95 was unique, problems not addressed then are still with us, only they’ve metastasized into incredibly destructive forces that are leading to another swelling tide that might lead to the end of NATO and Europe finally creating a unified and COHERENT foreign and defense policy.
Europe must take the current now, when it serves, or lose its ventures.
This week another insight into the American crisis came via a new historical analogy: the overthrow of England’s medieval King Richard II.
The brilliant historian Helen Castor subtly made the point about the relevance of King Richard to today’s American politics in an article for the online site Engelsberg Ideas. We know the story through Shakespeare’s play about a tragically flawed, self-indulgent monarch, but the tale of Richard II is much, much more than that in Castor’s view:
“It’s a story about what happens when a ruler demands loyalty to himself as an individual, rather than duty to the established constitution; when he seeks to create his own reality rather than concede the force of verifiable truths; when he demands that his own will should trump the force of law; when he recognises no interests other than his own. It’s also a story about the unpredictability of unfolding political crises, and about the ways in which authority can be bent, shaped and broken. And its themes of power, legitimacy, and the limits of rule and resistance are as urgent now as they have ever been.”
The story of Richard’s deposition by his first cousin Henry Bolingbroke is as much about overthrowing a nation’s constitutional order as it is a rivalry between two noblemen. Castor quotes fellow historians Christine Carpenter and Andrew Spencer’s definition of a constitution as:
‘The set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate’.
Carpenter and Spencer are referring to Britain’s unwritten or non-existent (you decide which term you prefer) constitution but at this moment that definition also describes the idealized sense in which most Americans think of their Constitution.
55 days into the second Trump administration, the lower courts in the US are busy dealing with a flurry of cases generated by his executive order assault on the constitution’s “political, government and legal structures.” The courts will decide what they can decide. Only the American people can respond to the rupture in shared values Trump 2:0 represents.
Legally the Constitution still holds, but in terms of shared values — the man who has the title “President” has lost his legitimacy already.
Upending the Constitutional order requires a flood tide, Castor points out. Is the tide at its peak? Not yet. But as the stock market slides and town halls become no go areas for MAGA politicians it is certainly swelling.
There is of course danger in forcing the issue, as Castor points out in her piece. But historical analogies are never perfect and in this moment of American crisis what is important about the story is that when the ruler breaks the constitutional order, constitutional supporters may have to break it as well, because there is no other way to defend it.
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