Alexandre Devecchio Martin Bernier

 After The Kremlin Mage, the writer continues his exploration of the mysteries of power, from the United States to Saudi Arabia, including tech giants. He delivers his observations in The Hour of the Predators (Gallimard), a twilight and luminous tale of the current political and geostrategic shift.


LE FIGARO . 


 The day after Trump's election, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, wrote on X: "I am certain that you do not fully understand the bifurcation of human civilization that began yesterday." Have we really changed the world?

GIULIANO DA EMPOLI . – Trump's reelection was a kind of apocalypse in the literal sense of the word: not the end of the world, but the revelation of something. Chaos, which until then had been the weapon of the insurgents, has become hegemonic. And we have fallen into the world of predators. As Joseph de Maistre said of the French Revolution, "For a long time we took it for an event. We were wrong: it is an epoch."


Behind the apparent chaos, isn't there a form of logic in the Trump administration?


There is, of course, a logic to it. But the political science of the last forty years is completely incapable of explaining it. To understand it, one must turn to the Latin classics, such as Suetonius, Tacitus, or the satires of Juvenal and Petronius. Even reading Machiavelli and Guichardin, one sees that predators like Trump and Bukele are perfectly typical figures. In a way, they represent the normality of human history. The exception was rather the phase that has just ended, when it was believed that lawyers and technocrats could always govern society.


It's a "return to normal" in the long-term, but we're living through a "Machiavellian moment," in your opinion. What characterizes this moment?


In Italy, at the very end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, the Machiavellian moment was characterized by the irruption of force. At this time, offensive technology developed faster than defensive technology: cast iron cannonballs were able to pierce the walls of the small, highly civilized Italian republics of the Renaissance. It was not until the mid-16th century that new fortresses capable of withstanding heavy artillery attacks were built. This restored peace, but Italy remained subject to the European powers until the mid-19th century.

Today, we are once again in a moment where offensive technologies are developing more than defensive ones. Starting with digital technology, launching a cyberattack or a disinformation campaign costs almost nothing, but the difficulty of defending against it is obvious! From then on, our small republics, our large or small liberal democracies, risk being swept away.


Does the announced rearmament of Europe mean that European heads of state have finally become aware of this new situation?


We are currently experiencing the shock of humiliation. It is the shock of a Roman province waking up with a new emperor; a very different, unpredictable, and arbitrary power falls upon it, and it realizes that it was only a province. This humiliation is here to stay. We are not going to emerge from it quickly. But it could be fruitful insofar as it can give us the desire to emerge from it. Will we be able to do so? It is too early to say.


You describe a world governed by power relations: in the negotiations with Russia, is Trump showing strength or weakness?


Based on the evidence we have, Trump's attitude toward Russia is quite surprising. I shared the idea that his return to the White House represented an opportunity to change dynamics. But everything we've seen so far is disconcerting, even in terms of negotiating tactics: we've seen Trump give in significantly to Putin without achieving much.


Among the "predators," do you put Putin, Trump, and even Mohammed Ben Salman and Nayib Bukele on the same level?


Political contexts are obviously very different and they don't produce the same results. But, fundamentally, they all obey the same logic. When you're in a Machiavellian moment where chaos dominates, there are no more rules and what prevails is the political miracle. The miracle is the direct intervention of God, who circumvents the normal rules of existence on earth to produce an extraordinary event. The logic of predators is the same. Putin calls this "manual control": when the rules no longer work, he has the power to intervene directly to produce the result he wants. This direct, surprising, and transgressive action produces astonishment. Since Cesare Borgia, this is what allows predators to consolidate their power.

In Mohammed bin Salman and Nayib Bukele, we find the typical Machiavellian idea that the end justifies the means. They therefore break the rules in extremely brutal ways. MBS locks the kingdom's 300 powerful people in their suites at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh to bring them into line. Borgia strangled his guests: it was worse, but it's the same principle! Then we can discuss the ends: in this case, a modernization of Saudi Arabia, an improvement in the position of women, a society that fights Islamists, and an abolition of the religious police within 24 hours. This brutality serves a vision. The same goes for Bukele: he imprisoned 80,000 tattooed people without trial because all gangsters are tattooed in El Salvador, but he believes he has freed millions of residents who lived in fear and are now in one of the safest countries in the world. All the rules are broken, but sometimes the results are there.


You say that "predators" "recognize each other." On the diplomatic stage, are countries whose leaders are not "predators" doomed to be marginalized?


I think they're having trouble getting their bearings right now. Because autocrats are perfectly accustomed to the idea of ​​relying on a small circle of loyal family and friends to govern the country. So they find it perfectly normal to establish their relationship with Trump on that basis. Whereas if you're a nice European democrat, you're going to want to follow an official protocol, address the foreign minister and ambassadors. That's going to get you absolutely nowhere with Trump. He's more in line with autocrats and royal families—he's even trying to establish a sort of royal family in the United States. So today, it's very difficult for the system's supporters to navigate.

These people had built their understanding of the world on respect for rules and procedures. I also note that since 1980, all the Democratic candidates for president and vice president of the United States—with the exception of Tim Walz—have been lawyers! Today, the “party of lawyers” is completely outdated. In his play Henry VI, Shakespeare has Dick the Butcher say: “In the time of Revolution, the first thing to do is to kill all the lawyers.” This is exactly what Trump is doing today: he is going against judges and attacking law firms. Tech bosses follow the same logic. They don’t want laws or rules; they just want to speed things up.

Democrats are failing to adapt because invoking compliance with the rules in the face of substantive issues is not a satisfactory response. Faced with images of the prisoners Trump sent to El Salvador, they countered by saying, "Those people didn't get a trial." That's true, and it's a problem, but their response is politically insufficient.


Many continue to think Trump is crazy, stupid, or irrational. Yet you write that "there is virtually no relationship between intellectual power and political intelligence"...


Trump is not intelligent in the intellectual sense of the term. He is someone who doesn't read at all. And I'm not just talking about books or newspapers (that's almost a given): he doesn't even read the ten lines of notes his advisors write to prepare him for a meeting. He only functions orally. And yet, he has a political acumen and an instinct for power that are remarkable. Conversely, there are very intelligent people who are completely lousy politicians.


During his first term, Trump could appear hostile to tech giants, and vice versa. With Elon Musk, we find ourselves with a mix of genres in government. How do you analyze this? Does this confirm their takeover?


Trump is certainly not a puppet. He's a powerful man with his own logic, and he's not beholden to tech. But we're witnessing a convergence between tech oligarchs and extreme political figures. Initially, tech bosses appeared as nice young men in hoodies, then they've grown in power over the past 25 or 30 years to the point of becoming powers comparable to states. It was during the Obama era that everything changed: in 2012, Google boss Eric Schmidt was more important to his re-election than Musk was to Trump's, but he remained in his place, behind the scenes. Today, a new threshold has been reached: the tech lords have understood that it is in their interest to sweep away the old political elites.

The old economic elites were perfectly comfortable with the kind social democrats and the kind liberals, a center-left and a center-right that were quite similar and rather technocratic. These were the blue slopes of Davos, a nicely marked trajectory. There, we arrived at the Magic Mountain. The tech giants have "a real desire to cause trouble," to borrow the title of Xavier Niel's book. Facebook's slogan was, moreover, "Move fast and break things." We find this logic of transgression: you have to break everything, free yourself from authorities and rules to deploy a new vision. This converges perfectly with the views of predators like Trump, who are also outsiders and want to free themselves from the constraints of the establishment.


Faced with this technological upheaval, should political power support the movement, try to regulate it, prevent it, or is it already too late?


It's probably too late. It would be completely foolish to oppose artificial intelligence—I'm no Luddite—but there's a serious problem with tech governance. New technologies and artificial intelligence projects may well take us into the next stage of human evolution. And it's not right for all of this to be in the hands of a few private companies and terrifying figures, each one more terrifying than the last, without any safeguards.

The old political elites behaved towards the digital giants like the Aztecs did towards the conquistadors. They could have defeated the 200 Spaniards who appeared on the banks, but they were impressed by their horses and rifles, those sticks from which fire and thunder emerge. They had never seen anything like it and took these men for gods. The politicians' relationship with the young men in hoodies was exactly the same. They thought they were aliens—in a way, they were. By remaining in this state of fascination, the old elite was unable to react. And they deserved to be swept away.


Does this necessarily lead us to chaos, or is Trump right when he spoke in his inaugural address of a "new gilded age"?


If it comes, the golden age won't happen tomorrow. I think the chaos will only get worse. That being said, it's possible that this chaotic transition phase will bring about a new order of some kind. This is also the vision of tech people; they don't imagine permanent chaos but see it as an instrument to bring about a new order. An order that would no longer be democratic but, according to them, beneficial for everyone because choices would be made rationally by algorithms.


Could people who are already increasingly less tolerant of technocratic elites support a technological government?


Perhaps not. The true futuristic novel about AI was written by Kafka. As in The Trial and The Castle , AI makes decisions without anyone knowing the criteria on which they are based. This is already a reality for some working people. Delivery drivers have almost no connection to a human superior: they are alone facing the application and its algorithm. And this form of organization will spread to the upper echelons of society; lawyers and doctors will be subject to it.

Will we be ready to tolerate an increasingly technocratic system? That's the real question. Intelligence would dictate that we try to integrate these instruments democratically, which is not impossible. Rilke said: "I live in bad harmony with cameras because I find them too arrogant and they lack the humility that machines should always have." I like this idea of ​​the humility of machines. However, to make machines humble, you don't have to be a Luddite; on the contrary, you have to be technologically advanced enough to be able to tame the machine.

 

LE FIGARO



Copied from a forward that copied the article from the famous French paper, a very interesting description of what is happening around the world and in America, at all political and governance levels, I will not comment on it, but leave it to my good readers to form their own opinions.

All my thanks to everyone....