Let us dispense with the usual niceties. The American House of Representatives, that august body now seemingly dedicated to the performative flailing of a nation in decline, has passed a resolution—bipartisan, no less—curbing Donald Trump’s ability to wage war on Iran. Our former president, a man who believes the presidential podium is a stage for his own soliloquy on grievance, immediately denounced the vote as ‘unpatriotic.’ And so we witness the latest act in the long, slow tragedy of American leadership disintegrating before our eyes.
One must ask: what does ‘unpatriotic’ even mean in this context? For Trump, it seems, patriotism is synonymous with personal loyalty. To dissent from his foreign policy is to betray the nation. This is the same logic that led Nero to blame the Christians for the fire, or that made Louis XVI see the Parisian mob as traitors to the crown. The House, in its creeping institutional jealousy, has dared to assert that the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. How terribly unpatriotic of them to follow the law.
But let us step back. This is not merely a spat between branches of government. This is symptomatic of a deeper rot, a fragmentation of the American idea. The United States, once the bulwark of the Enlightenment’s political ambitions, now resembles the late Roman Republic, where the Senate and the popular tribunes clawed at each other while the barbarians—metaphorical, in this case, perhaps the Iranian mullahs or the Russian oligarchs—waited at the gates. The fall of Rome was not a single event but a series of fractures, each one weakening the whole until collapse became inevitable. We are watching the American version in real time.
The vote itself is telling. 224 for, 194 against. A majority, yes, but a fractured one. The Democrats, eager to prove their anti-war credentials to a base that still dreams of ’60s peace marches, joined with a handful of Republicans who remember that the party of Lincoln once believed in something called ‘checks and balances.’ The result is a resolution with no binding power, a symbolic gesture that changes nothing on the ground. It is the political equivalent of a tweet: loud, angry, and utterly empty.
Meanwhile, the real world goes on. Iran continues its push for regional hegemony. The nuclear deal lies in tatters, a victim of Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ approach that achieved little beyond alienating our European allies. The Soleimani assassination, which Trump spun as a bold act of leadership, now looks like a reckless gamble that has only emboldened Tehran to strike back. And the American public, distracted by the circus of impeachment and the ceaseless torrent of presidential indignation, fails to ask the essential question: what is our strategy here? There is none. There is only Trump’s instinct, which is to lash out at anyone who contradicts him, and the House’s reflex, which is to lash back.
This is the hallmark of a decadent age. We have lost the capacity for grand strategy, for the longue durée thinking that built empires and sustained republics. Instead, we have become a nation of bickering factions, each more concerned with destroying the other than with preserving the whole. The French Third Republic, that doomed experiment in parliamentary paralysis, comes to mind. Or indeed Victorian Britain at its worst: a nation of shopkeepers, endlessly debating the price of bread while the world moved on. But at least the Victorians had a sense of national purpose. We have only narcissism.
Let me be clear: I do not write to defend Trump. I write to lament the state of a polity that has allowed itself to be reduced to this. The House vote is not a triumph of democratic oversight; it is a pathetic act of institutional weakness, a gesture that reassures no one and changes nothing. Trump’s response is not strong leadership; it is the petulance of a man who cannot stand to be told no.
What is to be done? The question smacks of despair. We cannot return to a golden age that never existed. But we can, perhaps, learn from history. The Roman Republic fell when its citizens lost faith in the institutions. When they preferred the strongman to the system. When a vote became a declaration of war rather than a debate about the common good. America is not Rome, not yet. But the road is short, and we are travelling it at speed.
So Trump blasts the House as unpatriotic. The House retorts by passing a meaningless resolution. And the American people, like spectators at a gladiatorial contest, cheer for their champion while the arena burns. We deserve better. But we have only ourselves to blame.
