Le Roi Soleil, the Sun King, the very centre of the universe, according to courtiers. But tucked away discreetly in a corner of a London museum is a very different Louis XIV as the great Baroque-era caricaturist Romeyn de Hooghe saw him, squatting on a globe receiving an enema, the royal excrement washing over the nations as chaos reigns all around. Throughout his seven-decade reign, Louis XIV created the Gilded Palace of Versailles, commissioned portraits depicting him as the god Apollo, and led his nation to the brink of ruin in a 14-year war with Spain.
This week, as Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Deputy National Security Adviser Pavan Kapoor head to Washington to repair ties frayed by US President Donald Trump’s push to mediate on Kashmir, they’ll be discovering an unfamiliar country.
America’s institutions, the instruments around which the world order has long been built, have begun to be turned into tools to feed the gargantuan appetites of the President, his family, and the oligarchy they represent. Trump has monetised his office for personal gain in ways that would have seemed inconceivable just a decade ago: $320 million in fees from a cryptocurrency project, billions in real estate deals, $500,000 memberships for a club, and a $200 million jet.
This has real-world consequences. The ends India seeks—among them, to push back against an increasingly assertive China, action against jihadists’ sanctuaries in Pakistan, the safety of global trade, and energy security—are not things that appear meaningful to Trump.
Look long enough at Romeyn de Hooghe’s masterpiece, and Trumpworld reveals itself in all its dystopian glory. Trump’s rise is a seizure of power by a libertarian elite of tech moguls and crypto-czars, concerned principally with their private wealth rather than questions of State and national power. This is a rupture in America’s long-running political institutions with profound consequences.
The virtuous republic
From its founding moments, law scholar Zephyr Teachout writes, America’s founding leaders were terrified that their new republic would become ensnared in the vices of the old world. France, though a revolutionary ally, was seen as “essentially corrupt, a nation in which there was no true polity, but instead exchanges of luxury for power; a nation populated by weak subjects and flattering courtiers.” For its part, the United Kingdom was “a place where the premise of government was basically sound but civic virtue—that of the public and public officials—was degenerating.”
Then, a strange problem presented itself involving jewelled snuff boxes and a horse.
After the Declaration of Independence, the politician and lawyer Silas Deane was sent to France on a covert mission to see whether it might be willing to provide the US with military equipment. The answer was yes, and Deane soon established himself as a legitimate trade agent. But in 1778, Deane was recalled to Congress and charged with fraud.
Leaving France, Deane received a jewelled snuff box for his diplomatic service—a standard custom in the court of Louis XVI. This was seized on by his political rival, Arthur Lee, who accused Deane of violating “one of the fundamental laws of our Union that no person in the service of the United States should accept from any king, prince, or minister any present or gratuity whatsoever.” The trial went nowhere, as the French did not disclose their accounts; however, Deane ended his career in disgrace.
The snuff box problem soon reappeared, though—this time, because Lee, in his turn, received one encrusted with diamonds from Louis. Like so many others, Lee had been quick to see corruption in others but was more nuanced in appraising his conduct. To Congress, he argued that refusing the snuff box would be an insult to the French.
Later, Congress approved the gift of a horse from Spain to Ambassador John Jay, even as he negotiated navigation rights with Spain. Congress also accepted the gift of yet another jewelled snuff box to founding father Benjamin Franklin.
Ten years into its existence as an independent nation, America was confronting its first major corruption scandals. The state of Georgia claimed territorial rights over deserted lands, as well as tracts held by native Americans. Georgia offered small plots of land to tillers, a move to encourage agriculture, but instead handed over millions of acres to politically well-connected companies. Thirty-five million acres were eventually sold for $500,000, with some plots going for less than a cent.
Even in the most virtuous polity, it became clear that human nature remained what it was.
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America’s sordid underbelly
Like Apple Pie, corruption embedded itself in American political culture. This was perhaps inevitable, as the work of the sociologist Charles Tilly teaches us. In a famous 1982 paper, Tilly argued that “banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum.” European nation-states in the medieval period, he noted, evolved from the concentration of military power in the hands of warlords. To secure their monopoly of power, though, the new kings had to share power with regional notables, offering them lands or a share of state revenues.
The historian Renate Bridenthal notes that American capitalism flourished on a bedrock of legal institution building, which protected property—but at the same time, had an underbelly of enabling the accumulation of wealth in defiance of these very rules.
Financial corruption, thus, underpinned the growth of the railways, which laid the foundation for American industry. Large-scale fraud, a study by economist Richard White has shown, led investors from Europe to lose millions of dollars. The construction costs of roads and railways were often manipulated to yield excess profits to small cliques. The bond salesman for the Memphis, El Paso and Pacific Railroad simply lied to French investors, relieving them of $5 million.
Even though law enforcement and legislation intervened to end this chaos, corruption continued to remain a critical part of the political fabric.
Four of nine past Illinois governors, as Thomas Gradel and Dick Simpson wrote in their 2015 study on corruption in Illinois, were convicted on charges ranging from selling bargain-priced racetrack stock to manipulating savings-and-loan banks, covering up the sale of driver’s licenses to unqualified drivers, shaking down contractors for campaign contributions, and attempting to sell a US Senate seat. Thirty-three Chicago aldermen and former aldermen have been convicted and gone to jail since 1973.
“Fewer than two hundred men and women have served in the Chicago city council since the 1970s,” Gradel and Simpson observe wryly, “so the federal crime rate in the council chamber is higher than in the most dangerous ghetto in the city.”
However, throughout the last century, the drive for private wealth and the pursuit of national power have balanced each other, with élites understanding that the pursuit of one needed the other.
A coming breakdown?
Trump’s rise is occurring at a precarious time. For more than a decade, it has been evident that American global power was as much an illusion as reality. True, the end of the Cold War ushered in a period in which the US could exercise unconstrained power, making war and setting norms as it saw fit. This period, however, was a historical accident, as the scholar Andrew Latham has pointed out, brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the anaemia of a China that was just beginning to emerge as a significant industrial power.
America remains the world’s preeminent power—but it has come to understand the limits of its influence and reach. The country needs to sustain its critical ties with Europe while at once persuading its allies there to spend more resources on their security. It needs to find means to deter China from coercing its Pacific neighbours, while avoiding war and the disruption of global supply chains.
Trump, obsessed with using his office to enrich himself and the oligarchy over which he presides, has neither the interest nor the inclination to concern himself with these questions. Alienating partners and allies is of no significance in a worldview that imagines America can wall itself off from the world and yet remain rich.
Likely, America’s economic élite will push back and restore some order to Trumpworld, if for no other reason than to secure their interests. Till then, India will have to be prepared to negotiate a world filled with bandits and gangsters, and from which the police have mysteriously disappeared.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
If the United States is no longer a big umbrella on a dark rainy night, would it be prudent for India to reimagine its relationship with China and Pakistan. For both security and and an enabling environment for economic development, is it helpful to be in a state of near war with both.