Waiting for the Americans

Notes from the brink

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

— “Waiting for the Barbarians”, Constantine Cavafy

There are many posts I would like to write and share with you, but tonight I would like to share this one, because the others are less urgent and because my emotions are too shaken at the moment.

Over the past few days, President Trump’s statements have been shocking: vulgar, angry, berserk, profane. Threatening to wipe out an entire civilization—did he merely mean to say regime? does he grasp the difference between one word and another?—and raging at the Iranian power structure to open the f’ing strait in the same desperate tones as a Hollywood robber whose plans are going awry telling the bank clerk to open the f’ing safe—these are the sorts of statements that one would expect from, say, a Gadhafi, although I cannot recall the Libyan leader being quite so coarse. (Putin, for what it’s worth, did once threaten Chechen terrorists in terms redolent of Trump’s Easter missive: “If we find terrorists in the shithouse, then we’ll waste them in the shithouse.”)

At the moment, we are all waiting for the Americans. The center of gravity is not here but in the Situation Room, where the illusion of control bewitches the king and his court. Waiting to see how Trump will make good on his deadline for Iranian action—whether the escalation will be a movement against Abu Musa & the Tunbs; against nuclear facilities with a commando raid; against the energy and water infrastructure of a country of 90 millions; or whether it will take some other, unspeakable form—or whether Trump will announce at the last moment that a ceasefire has been imposed because sufficient progress has been made. That latter scenario would be cinematic: a reprieve granted the condemned by a generous governor—exactly the sort of cliffhanger resolution and playing against type that Trump glories in.

We are also waiting for those Americans beyond Trump and his circle. What will Congress do? an anchor asked me on television the other day, and I stumbled—I am a putative expert on American politics and Congress, and I worked on the Hill, and all I can say is that Congress is on vacation and the leadership seems reluctant to recall that they have an independent constitutional role. (Perhaps the problem with presidential systems is not presidentialism as a structural trait but presidentialism as a habitus, as a practice of deferring to the first among equals that becomes a bodily rejection of the possibility of wielding one’s own authority. Perhaps the senators were waiting for the barbarians eagerly.)

What, then, of the American people? They have spoken through their surveys and they are unhappy with the war—but they cannot register their voice in full until November and their words will not take effect until January. There is a better chance that the war will bring down the prime minister of the UK before it substantially crimps the powers of the American president. Waiting for public action, the sort of dramatic coup de main that could shake the body politic, seems unlikely. Even the great protests of the Vietnam era could only gradually mobilize opinion against a war bloody not only for the Vietnamese (and the Cambodians and Laotians) but for the Americans to a degree unfathomable for a country that was scandalized that a single flyer was trapped behind enemy lines for three days. Even the fastest organizers on record could not get a rally assembled before the deadline of 8 Eastern (3 am local time).

And the Iranians, of course, are waiting for the Americans—the Iranian public indoors, under much the same sort of stairwells we huddled beneath during the first few days, when the emergency alerts were a novelty; the Iranian military and militia throughout the country, waiting to receive a blow and perhaps strike one of their own.

I have memories only of a couple of moments when history seemed to pause: the moment when I saw the second tower of the World Trade Center crumble on television, for instance. This is not yet that moment but it is pregnant with that possibility. And what is grimmer is that there will be no catharsis, or at least no lasting one: we will be back here in six months or a year, fighting over the Strait or the missile programs or something else. In the meantime, we all await the Americans. What can we do until then?