One thing that has surprised me over the last two years is how almost no one understood my point right after the 2016 election, that Donald Trump is a sort of Bizarro Carter.
By that I meant he is completely the opposite of Jimmy Carter. Carter was a Democrat. Trump is an Autocrat. Carter believed in human rights. Trump believes in the divine right of kings. Carter championed the environment. Trump trashes it. Carter said he’d never lie to us. Trump lies 6 times before breakfast.
What they have in common is they represent the end times for the Political Thesis that birthed them. Carter was elected 44 years after Franklin Roosevelt and was the last President to run on those principles. Trump came 48 years after Nixon and will be the last President elected under the Nixon Thesis of Conflict.
Carter and Trump were only possible because of a peculiar fact of life. We live longer. Your politics, like your taste in music, are usually defined in youth, around the assumptions of your time. Carter was born into the era of the New Deal, and those ideals still resonated in the mid-1970s. Now we live even longer. The ideals of Nixon still resonated 48 years later. Woodstock is a half-century in the rear-view mirror, but David Crosby is still working.
Carter built his coalition on manufacturing, the dominant growth engine of the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when resources had already become the path to economic growth. Similarly, Trump is focused on resources, especially oil, long after technology has become the way to economic growth.
I might call this Moore’s Law of Politics. Moore makes politics run backwards, by keeping people on the political stage longer.
Back to current events. At this point in his term, Jimmy Carter was negotiating the Camp David Peace Accords. They were signed on September 17, 1978 and they still hold. As this is written, Trump is trying to start a decisive war in the Middle East, alongside a self-styled Louis XIV in Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud or MbS.
MbS’ title is Crown Prince, but he is in fact his country’s regent. His father, King Salman, is 82, and Salman’s whole generation is dying off. What MbS hopes to create is a “Pax Saudiana,” a Caliphate that dominates the entire Muslim world, from Pakistan to Morocco. He’s a young man in a hurry.
Trump is also in a hurry. He wants an accomplishment his followers can point to with pride. A generation-long peace in the Middle East suits him. If that means Bashar Assad dies in his bed, if it means any moves toward democracy and human rights are crushed across the Muslim World for decades, he’s down with that. So long as it stops the flow of refugees, he’s fine.
While Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is nominally an ally, part of NATO, and supposedly elected, although he is more of an autocrat every day, he stands against MbS’ dreams of a Pax Saudiana. He’s in the way. So suddenly we’re in a trade war with Turkey, whose troops are the only ones now standing in the way of Assad in Syria.
The same thing with Hassan Rouhani in Iran. He was elected to his office. He didn’t inherit it like MbS did. But he’s in the way. So, the Iran deal on nuclear weapons so painstakingly negotiated by Obama is toast, and now we have a trade embargo.
Last year, when Qatar got in the way of MbS’ dominance in the peninsula, Trump sided with the Saudis. Who cares that Al Jazeera, for all its faults, is the only non-state medium of any scale in the region? Rex Tillerson was fired for preventing MbS from swallowing Qatar like a ripe grape. Guess who’s now throwing Turkey a lifeline?
While the Saudi monarchy is economically strong, because oil comes out of the ground there, it is militarily very weak. Trump supports a Saudi war against Yemen that has become a genocide, one that Saudi has been unable to end, despite the treasure it has cost. Maybe Trump sees himself as Hitler, MbS as Mussolini, and Yemen as Ethiopia. Trump supports the military dictatorship in Egypt, which ruthlessly oppresses the largest Arab population in the world. Maybe Trump thinks the end game is he and MbS being greeted in Libya as liberators.
Osama bin Laden and the other Saudis who attacked us on 9/11 were followers of the Caliphate ideology of Wahhabi Islam. Who, by the way, is the nominal head of that religion? The Kings of Saudi Arabia. The absolute rule of Sharia Law decreed by the Caliphate has been Saudi state ideology for almost a century. Trump is doing everything he can to bring it on, under MbS.
Right now, they’re both closer to their aims than any autocrat has come since Hitler ruled Europe.
But there’s a problem with this. Go back to the Carter analogy. Technology now dominates the world, not oil. Oil can be replaced. MbS knows this and believes that if he buys enough solar panels he can power the electric world as he now powers the oil world.
But solar panels are not resources. They are a product of technology. They’re constantly dropping in price, and in cost. New technologies for making them, and for energy storage, are coming along all the time. Sometime in the next few years one of them is going to break out, delivering a Moore’s Law 10x improvement in cost efficiency. What happens to MbS’ dreams of energy dominance then? It shatters like the glass in so many of today’s silicon-based solar panels.
Trump has tied himself to a cause doomed to failure, a Caliphate doomed to die because its business model is becoming inoperative. His chief ally is Ozymandias.
Technology has no use of slaves. It needs high quality human capital, educated and willing men and women who can use the tools of Moore’s Law to recreate the future and rebuild the world. History has no use for the lazy male misogynists of MbS’ Arabia.
The conflict now starting in Turkey and Iran looks like a winner to many American analysts. It’s a loser. Trump has hitched himself, not to a thoroughbred, but to a nag, and both will be inexorably destroyed by economic forces that long ago made them irrelevant.
When? Probably sometime in the fall of 2019. The symmetry would be exquisite.
