Week signals: Here be dragons
Plus: watch points for Cyprus, the US, Mexico, Taiwan, the Quad, China, and North Korea.
Hello,
In this edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. Weaponising the English School; Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft and getting the shaft.
UP AHEAD. Cyprus elections; USMCA negotiations; Taiwan’s defence; the Quad; Xi in Pyongyang.
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The Week in Review: Good chaps to Goodfellas
Co-authored with Oscar Martin.
The week began with threats to attack Iran. It ended with worries that the US was about to invade Cuba (or even Greenland). In between, doubt was cast on US support for Taiwan (now explicitly a negotiating chip, as we’ve long feared), and Poland got a reprieve on US troops, albeit linked to Donald Trump’s endorsement of its president.
But perhaps the most important developments weren’t in American foreign policy, a week out from Trump’s visit to Beijing and amid a slow-burning global oil crisis, but what is happening domestically.
All politics is local, as Tip O’Neill put it, and the tone is set at the top. What happens in Washington doesn’t stay in Washington. And, for better or worse, even as the US unipolar moment ends, the decisions and attitudes made in the White House impact the decisions and attitudes everywhere else.
We’re not so much talking about the midterm Republican primaries, though these are a case study in how personal loyalty is trumping everything else in US politics, but the administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as part of a settlement resolving Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax records. The fund is designed for people claiming harm from government weaponisation or lawfare, with January 6 defendants eligible to apply, while an addendum blocks future audits of Trump’s past tax filings. Two officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 have sued to block payments from the fund, arguing that it could compensate people connected to the attack on Congress.
The settlement is not only extraordinary because Trump sued the IRS while also leading the government that would ultimately settle the case, but also because it turns a personal legal claim against the state into a public compensation scheme for Trump’s political camp, while also limiting future tax scrutiny of Trump, his family and his businesses. The state is being made to compensate the president’s allies while narrowing the state’s own future claims against the president.
As we’ve written before, liberal systems depend on the expectation that public office will remain separate from private interest, and that officeholders will accept some restraint even where the law leaves room for abuse. No constitution can specify every act of self-dealing, or every moment when a legal instrument becomes a protection for loyal followers. The first line of defence has always been a sense that certain uses of power are corrosive, even if they aren’t strictly illegal.
The British “good chap” theory of politics was built around that assumption. The British system has long relied on unwritten understandings: ministers resign when they mislead parliament, prime ministers respect the limits of office, and courts remain outside ordinary partisan attack. The system made a virtue of good common sense. It worked reasonably well while officeholders still feared disgrace, exclusion from polite political society, and the quiet judgment of people whose approval they valued.
Yet since Trump’s election in 2016, and especially since his re-election eight years later, disgrace has lost its force in politics, and the vulnerabilities of ‘good chap’ norms have been exposed. A political system based on non-enforced norms of politeness and expectations struggles when enough people learn that embarrassment is entirely optional. Trump has found and exploited that weakness in the American and international systems.
The United States has a thicker written constitution than Britain, and a larger apparatus of courts and congressional oversight. However, it still depends on a level of informal restraint, especially in the executive branch. Presidents are meant to leave the Justice Department outside personal legal strategy. Tax enforcement is meant to sit outside factional politics. Regulators, prosecutors and civil servants are meant to act as public institutions rather than instruments of political punishment. Trump has deeply undermined these expectations with very little backlash. In fact, it has become the defining feature of his politics.
For much of the post-war period, and especially after the Cold War, Western foreign policy leaned on a diplomatic version of the same expectation. The world was anarchic, yet still imagined as a society with strong norms governing good behaviour. The English School of international relations argued that sovereign states could form an “anarchical society” through diplomacy, international law, balance of power, great-power management and shared institutions. In this view, States remained selfish, but they could still develop practices that made an anarchical international system into a manageable ‘society of states’. With this idea came other elements of societies, including unenforced norms and expectations.
For the past several decades, this view was plausible despite moments of conflict and hypocrisy. The United Nations retained prestige even when it failed. International law was invoked by governments violating it, which at least confirmed the acknowledgement of a set of rules, even if they weren’t followed. Great powers lied, cheated, threatened, and invaded while maintaining a level of politeness and cordiality, with the view that rules were important. Despite hypocrisy, at least states recognised that a standard existed.
That pretence has been weakening as states act less like ‘good chaps’ and more like Goodfellas. The US, the principal architect of the previous order, now veers between universalism and something closer to a protection racket, with Donald as don at the centre of it all. We are now in a world where the international order is less a society of states with the UN holding accountability, and more a smattering of rival mob bosses.
This is accentuated by a sociological shift. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies first described Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to distinguish between two forms of social order. Gemeinschaft describes relations based on belonging, familiarity and inherited obligation. Gesellschaft describes relations based on contract, calculation and formal rules. The growth of liberal modernity assumed politics would keep moving toward the second model, focused more on law, procedure and impersonal institutions. The current turn in democratic politics suggests a partial movement back toward the first, as voters who distrust distant institutions look again for protection, identity and loyalty.
In many places, Gesellschaft produced wealth, efficiency and scale, but also loneliness, insecurity and a sense of being governed by distant systems that neither recognised nor cared much for the people living inside them. When institutions are trusted, impersonality can feel like fairness. When trust disappears, impersonality feels like abandonment.
The return of Gemeinschaft now runs through democratic politics across the West. People who distrust institutions are looking for belonging in what they see as their ‘community’. People exposed to markets look for protection, and those who feel patronised by liberal society look for closer forms of identity. Trump’s protectionist and mafia-style politics are a primary driver of this shift as global politics shifts from a shared societal structure to a set of siloed communities.
The good chap theory depended on restraint, and the English School depended on a society of states. Gesellschaft depended on impersonal institutions satisfying the human need for order. Those assumptions are now under pressure. The rules still operate, but they are increasingly mediated by people who want to know whom the rules protect, whom they punish, and who has enough power to bend them.
So what does this mean for you?