This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Do Those Dominating a Situation Truly Bluff & Then Back Down?: Misreadings from Melos to Davos, & BeyondDid Trump “dominate” Davos—or just do his chaos-monkey routine in other people’s Common European (& Atlantic-Arctic) Home? Or how not to read Thoukydides in the context of Trump’s grapples with the...
Did Trump “dominate” Davos—or just do his chaos-monkey routine in other people’s Common European (& Atlantic-Arctic) Home; or how not to read Thoukydides in the context of Trump’s grapples with the Greenland Defense Force…This morning my feed brings me something that strikes me as extremely weird:
This is—to say the least—a definite outlier in my feed. Otherwise, it has the vibe that Trump went to Davos to make himself look ridiculous and incompetent. The dominant general reaction is things like:  accompanied by some frantic backpedaling by those hoping to become rich and powerful through going all-in on the Trump grift and supporting the Greenland-annexation idea:
So what gives here? Well, my first reaction is that this once again fits my rule-of-thumb:
The rule-of-thumb is that whatever the underlying truth may be, it is definitely not what it says on the tin at the The Free Press, which is not a “press”, at least not as we conventionally think of that human social practice. But I dove deeper into what “Trump Won Davos” and “dominate[d]” it in a way Naill had “never before seen a single individual so completely” do meant. And by the end I discovered that the argument is that Trump dominated Davos by not dominating it. You see, Trump went to Davos:
But by the end of the meeting Trump had:
So how is—this starting out with a declaration of what must happen, a declaration that then goes nowhere—“dominating” the meeting? Because, Niall explains:
Ummmm. Maybe? It would have been a very screwy thing to do. But Trump and his coterie of grifters do many screwy things. Many of them are damaging and destructive and deadly. But what is the evidence that this is what Trump’s Master Plan for Davos was? And how is this “dominating” the meaning? Where to start? Start with this: etymology often helps keep you grounded. When the political and media classes drift off into free-floating narratives about personality and “vibes,” the history of words can quietly tug us back toward structure and substance. Words encode social relations, institutional arrangements, and long-forgotten hierarchies. Following their trails, you can see how power presented itself to itself. So when we find ourselves talking about whether someone “dominated” a room or was “in command” of a space, it is useful, I think, to remember where those words came from. Latin domus—“house.” From domus we get dominus, the lord and master of the house. From dominus we eventually get the modern “dominate”. To dominate is not to posture or to bluster or command at home. It is to be the one who is at home, the one whose will is presumed to set the terms to which others must adapt—or leave. The dominus is the figure for whom the walls, the servants, the rules, and the rituals all exist already and automatically. When we talk about whether someone “dominated” an international gathering, that is the background resonance. Is someone one of many enacting a performance in a contested situation? Or are they truly the one whose purposes the house as it stands currently exists to serve? With that in mind, does it really seem like Donald Trump was comfortable “in his own house” at Davos? One can, I guess, storm through the lobby and attract cameras. But that is not the same thing as moving through the space one has had built to one’s specifications, and within which one has arranged the furniture. Being fearful that the Europeans might band together to disrupt your plans for getting Ukraine and Iran to knuckle under? It that the posture of someone truly at home in his own house? A genuine dominus does not fret that the guests might unexpectedly organize a tenants’ association. If you are worried that a coalition of medium-sized powers will frustrate your schemes, what you are signaling is not mastery but fragility: you know that you do not control the institutional plumbing, the coalition arithmetic, the bureaucratic follow-through. You suspect—rightly—that others have more veto points than you have levers. Moreover, there are no visible signs that there is any coherent method or plan for Ukraine or Iran behind the bluster. To dominate in the meaningful sense would require a strategy that aligns means and ends, a theory of victory, and a plausible account of how today’s threats and photo-ops translate into tomorrow’s outcomes. What we have instead, as far as one can tell, is a mixture of improvisation, personal grievance, and performative toughness that never quite congeals into policy. The absence of a strategy is a rather large hole in any story about geopolitical “domination.” And one thing of which we can be reasonably sure is that figures like Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick were not party to any hidden master plan. You do not sequester your supposed financial and political master whisperers in the cheap seats if they are integral co-authors of a cunning design. You do that when their function is decorative rather than strategic, and when your “strategy” consists largely of keeping options open until the next impulse strikes. If Niall were to be right, Bessent and Lutnick were, from all available evidence, kept far outside whatever passes for the inner circle of deciders and advisers. If such a circle even exists. If there are advisers. If there are deciders. Thus if I had to bet, I would bet that Niall before the meeting wanted to write a “Trump Dominated Davos” column, but the raw material of the event refused to cooperate. The facts would not sustain outright triumphalism. So he resorted to a familiar television trope: the Xanatos Gambit <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit>, in which even the most catastrophic defeats are retrospectively redescribed as and retconned into steps in a deeper, more cunning plan. Heads, the protagonist wins; tails, it turns out that losing this particular coin toss was all part of the script. It is, I think, a convenient way to never concede that the would-be master of the house might actually be flailing. Far more credible, to me at least, is Henry Farrell’s account of Davos. Farrell takes seriously the institutional context, the preferences and constraints of the various actors, and the ways in which Trump’s behavior is bounded by structures he neither fully understands nor controls. Rather than retrofitting a 4D-chess narrative onto a sequence of ad hoc moves, Farrell reads the episode as an illustration of how a chaotic presidency collides with a still-functioning—if fraying—network of allied states, corporate interests, and international organizations. That story may be less flattering to Trump and less thrilling for those in search of master strategists, but it fits both the etymology and the observable reality rather better. But before I turn to Henry, that last line I quoted from Niall— “that kind of ruse was also known to the ancient Athenians. But probably not to the Melians” —seriously annoys me as a gross and ignorant misreading of Thoukydides of the Athenai and his great book Thoukydides of the Athenai wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians…, the one we call The Peloponnesian War. Niall, in his paragraph eight, writes:
“Immortal reply”, “the origin of the dichotomy… between idealism and realism”. The Athenians’ reply is indeed immortal, but not in the sense that Niall gives it. For it turns out, in Thoukydides’s narrative of the Peloponnesian War and in the empirical reality of that war that the Athenians’ “realism” was not very realistic at all. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in large part because those who ought to have been their allies defected to the Spartan and to the Haksamanishya cause. Pointing out that might-overrides-right arrogance is the opposite of a realistic means-ends policy is the reason that Thoukydides put the Melian Dialogue into his book. Why? Because a rogue power that thinks and acts as though it is strong and able to “do what it can” was seen as much more of a threat than the rather insular Spartans or Persian satraps who spent much more time looking east than west. And so Athens’s imperial arrogance called into being a Grand Alliance against it. And, in the end, as Xenophon writes in his Hellenica: the Spartan commander
from the tyranny of the Athenian Empire. Afterwards history went in very unexpected directions, but not to the benefit of any of the projects of Athens as a great power. Thoukydides writes that his history
But that requires that you actually read and understand what Thoukydides is saying, and understand how much and how fatally Athens harmed itself via being not a benevolent hegemon trusted to be just and fair but rather the Athens of the Mytilene Decree, the Syracusa Expedition, and the Melian Dialogue. There. I have gotten that off my chest. Now Henry Farrell, whom I think gets the Davos Meeting right with the Right Grand Narrative of what went down. Henry says:
And to back up his Grand Narrative, Henry Farrell points out that it is what Trump Administration officials thought happened at Davos, and exhibits reciepts in the chaning tenor of the statements from Trump officials:
But we are not done. What could it mean to get the Davos meeting right, anyway? Two months after Waterloo a correspondent asked Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, commander of the victorious British-Dutch-Hanoverian army, to recount his understanding of the battle. Arthur Wellesley demurred:
He demurred in spite of his having written, two months earlier in the immediate aftermath of the battle, just such a recounting of his understanding of the battle to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies:
Earl Bathurst was expecting that Arthur Wellesley would deliver to him just such an understanding as Arthur Wellesley would later say could not be done. And on the basis of Wellesley’s public Waterloo Dispatch would be constructed the public meaning of the battle. It served Wellesley’s purposes in his dispatch to highlight three things:
That is the story that Arthur Wellesley told in his June 19 letter to Lord Bathurst. But while it is not a false story, is not the true story. There are many true or tru-ish stories in the the sense of being a not-incredible Grand Narrative, and we need Grand Narratives as hooks on which to hang ideas if we are to think at all, we East African Plains Apes are, you must admit, bears of very little brain. But all Grand Narratives are also false: the map can never be the territory. What Arthur Wellesley’s three-point Grand Narrative of Waterloo is, above everything else, a useful narrative for him, with his affinities, his allegiances, and his goals. It did indeed become, for English-speakers, the core of the public meaning of the Battle of Waterloo. Often, however, later public meaning can become only loosely moored, or completely unmoored, from any tru-ish recount of the actual history, especially since a wise person understands that no single “as it actually happened” can ever be written down. Consider the public meaning of Ronald Reagan, especially in his second term. Was he the Mighty Colossus Leader of the Revivified Neoliberal West? Or was he a“poor dear: he means well, but not very much between the ears”, as Margaret Thatcher judged him? And was U.S. policy toward Gorbachev after his accesion to the Hammer-&-Sickle Throne shaped by rational analysis? Or was it the result of a back-corridors palace fight between George Shultz and the cold warriors on the one hand and Nancy Reagan and her astrologer on the other, in which Nancy gave a surprisingly good account of herself? The Decision of History is that the public meaning is the first: Mighty Colossus Leader of the Revivified Neoliberal West. But any digging into the details makes that very hard to sustain. Nevertheless, the public meaning remains what it is. So when Niall Ferguson says that he thinks Davos worked for Trump as a progress and demonstration of royal power, his statement is also a move in a game to establish the future public meaning of Davos 2026. The stakes for Trump and his posse of grifters are relatively high in portraying Trump as dominating the meeting, as a winner, as his defeat being a Xanatos Gambit victory, in some sense. It is always true that the Mighty Dragon does not know each individual mountain as well as the local snake. But it is also true that as long as the Mighty Dragon can convince all local snakes that he can stomp any one snake among them, the Mighty Dragon does not have to know the mountain. The Mighty Dragon then threatens to stomp the snake that most annoys him, and so all the snakes compete in a race to the bottom not to be the most annoying. That’s how imperial power works. But you have to actually show yourself successfully stomping a snake, at least occasionally. And so we get Ferguson: Denmark was actually not the designated snake-to-be-stomped! Trump outsmarted all of you! The designated snake-to-be-stomped is actually Ukraine! Or Iran! Or something else in the future! Stranger social facts with respect to public meaning have been willed into being by mere words in the past, and will, humans being of the same kind, be willed into being in the future. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##do-those-dominating-a-situation-truly-bluff-then-back-down |
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