The Dilemma of the Pacifist Lion

The evolving view from the foxy B-plot of history

The Dilemma of the Pacifist Lion is the persistent problem faced by a leader who wants to simultaneously project pacifist intentions and lion-like masculinity. Lion in the Machiavelli-Pareto lion-vs-fox sense.

And speaking as a fox, observing history unfold from my temporarily irrelevant B-plot side character role as a trafficker of words and ideas, the spectacle of a main-character lion trying and failing to grapple with the dilemma is starting to seem distinctly funny. I know I’m not supposed to find amusement in grim and tragic matters of war, death, and destruction, but I’ve decided to lower my standards of decent solemnity, since it looks like we’re going to be in this grimdark planetary mood for a while.

Here’s the thing. If you truly believe strength speaks through actions rather than words, and that “strong men create good times,” you have to tell your story through a series of loud, immediately consequential, and unambiguous actions, accompanied by as few weasely weak-man words as possible. Unfortunately, only one sort of action truly fits that purpose — decisive military action.

Such as dropping the world’s biggest non-nuclear bombs into an ambiguous situation, accompanied by just three lofty-sounding and vibey words that say nothing: Operation Midnight Hammer.

As Nils Gilman notes in his hot take:

the rationale and repercussions of these actions remain not merely unclear, but a deliberate, almost artistic, void. Furthermore, the consequences are completely unknowable at this point — maybe this will finally lead to the decisive “transformation of the Middle East” that George Bush promised us 22 years ago, but equally it could produce an utter catastrophe. Anyone speaking confidently about where on that spectrum it will fall is full of shit and should be distrusted on principle.

My favorite theory of why Trump chose the path he did is one I spotted doing the rounds on social media — he did it to counterprogram the increasingly compelling TACO theory (Trump Always Chickens Out) that even his own allies are trading on, in the stock market.

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The Contraptions Book club June pick is Monkey King/Journey to the West. Chat thread here. Discussion week has kicked off!

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The rise of the TACO theory of Trump 2.0 richly illustrates the nature of the Dilemma of the Pacifist Lion.

Trump 1.0 was primarily a theater of lion-like excuses built around the mythology of an entrenched, resistant Deep State and degenerate but cunning foxy obstruction by a viable opposition. It could get away with essentially doing nothing very obnoxiously and loudly.

Trump 2.0 controls all branches of the state, several levels deep, thanks to an effective “Professional Managerial Class” purge campaign, and is faced with an opposition so weak, it seems almost embarrassing to credit them with any capacity for resistance. And there isn’t a poverty of actual ideas either. There is a stocked supply chain of ideologically vetted grand plans waiting to be implemented, complete with staffing plans and hiring pipelines.

Trump 2.0 in other words, has no real excuses. It must script four years of strong lion-like actions — while dismantling much of the state’s capacity to act, and retreating from every consequential theater of action.

Unfortunately, substantive actions in our complex modern world take time and care to script, and more time and care to implement without derailment. And even in the best case, they typically yield slowly and ambiguously unfolding consequences that require even more time and effort to own via narrative wrangling. That’s an amount of time lions don’t have, and a level of effort that is seemly for strong lion types to be seen to exert.

And this is hard enough to do well, and survive with a net positive reputation and legacy, even if you have a strong and growing state capacity, competently staffed, at your disposal. It becomes nearly impossible if you’re dismantling and retreating while trying to act expansively.

Take the record of activities so far. Tariffs, deportations, defundings, renamings of water bodies, random sabre-rattling against Greenland and Panama, student visa blockades… (and a whole host of smaller actions — loosening emissions restrictions on fossil fuels, apparently a repeal of the asbestos ban nobody asked for that is in the works…).

Every one of these has run into exactly the sort of run-time renegotiation and sensemaking process you’d expect in the implementation of complex initiatives. And if expectations had been managed with the sorts of ifs and buts favored by foxy leaders, nobody would care. Except, decisive actions and immediate consequences were promised, and expected.

Ifs, buts, renegotiations of changing expectations, and an overall responsiveness to evolving complex realities are for weak men creating hard times. For cunning and deceiving foxy types, not honest and strident lion types.

Even ignoring the toothless opposition’s opinions, complex and foxy squabbling has ensued even within loyalist ranks. And claims that it is all “the art of the deal” ring increasingly hollow. The jury is out on absolutely everything (in many cases, literal juries as the activities wind their way through courts at a pace even a compliant Supreme court can’t significantly accelerate).

The only certain consequence of all this activity is a growing sense of uncertainty and irreversible damage of capabilities and control in every area.

Hence the TACO phenomenon. Strong, decisive actions that speak louder than words that turn out to be weak, indecisive, non-actions after all, requiring a surprising number of words and volatile resets to midwife into any sort of consequential outcome. Bangs repeatedly negotiated down to whimpers at the end of the world.

And when the consequences do arrive, they typically arrive too far in the future to be of use for charismatic storytelling right now. By the time the Kilmar story ended, nobody had the attention to spare to capitalize on it one way or another. When the tariff policy (whatever it looks like right now, I’ve lost track) eventually hits and inflation does what it does in response, months will have passed. And a great deal more confusing new context will have accumulated, limiting the ability to spin clear and satisfying tales out of whatever happens.

All that has been visible so far is TACO theater, and humiliating responses from the rest of the world. The dilemma of the pacifist lion increases daily.

Watching this unfold over the last half-year, I initially suspected that the Trump regime was deliberately running a sort of Gish-gallop narrative operation. Before you can finish arguing that the tariffs are stupid chaos-monkeying with supply chains, a new front has been opened up around a fight with Harvard. And before you can react meaningfully to that, a bizarre new plot has developed around deportations to El Salvador. And while you’re figuring out how mad you should get about that, there is a round of mean-girls drama with Musk. And before the dust settles on that, you’re slammed with a split-screen spectacle of a military parade and “No Kings” protests. And while you’re deciding whether there’s anything worth reacting to in that, a big bomb gets dropped on Iran.

Yes, it’s disorienting to watch, but I don’t think it is a wily disorientation and psyche collapse engineered by a masterful OODA-loop hack. The opposition has already collapsed, and is not worth collapsing further.

It looks disorienting because it actually is disoriented. These are the behaviors of a pacifist lion on the horns of a dilemma, unable to find narrative traction in the available possibilities for action.

In a debate conducted entirely with words, this would be an unambiguous Gish gallop strategy on display. But when you’re speaking with Strong Lion Actions, a more plausible hypothesis is that your actions, far from speaking louder than words, aren’t speaking at all, leaving you unable to tell the story you want to tell. Or even counterprogram stories you don’t want told. They’re simply presenting a spectacle of snowballing confusion and ineptitude. You don’t look like either a lion or a fox. You look like you’re repeatedly chickening out because you don’t know what you’re doing and are running into responses you didn’t anticipate. And no amount of sycophants dutifully muttering “a masterclass in the art of the deal” can arrest the growing perception of incoherent flailing.

We can contrast the image of Trump today with the image he projected seconds after surviving an assassination attempt with the finest improvised photo-op pose ever. The decline in the narrative stock of the fighting lion since then has been precipitous (though not as precipitous as that of Elon Musk’s Icarus-like fall). This is not a story that has been unfolding well for its main character.

So what do you do? You drop a big bomb into a theater of conflict (which was itself partly sparked by the permissioning effect of your hasty and unscripted withdrawal from the scene, touting pacifist desires to stop being the Global Police).

Well, that’s certainly a loud, decisive, and immediately consequential action. What those consequences are in the long term we’ll find out, but in the short term, the action does advance the story Trump needs advanced: He’s definitely a strong, masculine guy who can drop big bombs. He really is that guy in the post-assassination fighting pose. Not the unfair caricature painted by that nasty TACO narrative, no sir.

In fact, he’s such a strong, fighting, big-bomb-dropping lion, he should win… a Nobel Peace Prize for it?

It is worth looking at Trump’s confused and confusing obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize in light of the Dilemma of the Pacifist Lion. Pakistan just nominated him, citing his questionable role in the recent India-Pakistan conflict, and some other peace-brokering sideshows in other relatively marginal conflicts. He did his usual whining about why he wouldn’t win because his name wasn’t Obama.

Now, the interesting question is, why would you even want this prize, even with a more credible nomination? The prize’s reputation was entirely trashed by the Obama win (I still wonder why he didn’t quietly refuse it; did he perhaps actually want it a little bit, or did he simply not want to embarrass the committee and any second-choice winner?). And then of course, the Obama administration went on to be nearly continuously at war for 8 years, firmly establishing the contours of the doctrine of Congressional-authority-finessing undeclared Presidential wars that is apparently the bipartisan US military posture today. Obama obviously didn’t deserve the prize when he won (even he knew that). The win tanked the already poor reputation of the prize from a C to a D. And then Obama went on to deserve it even less by 2016, adding a further slide from D to E.

Why would you want this trashed prize at all? Trump certainly doesn’t need the money. Even wanting the untarnished prize seems odd for him. Like a celebrity barbecue chef wanting a prize for best vegetarian dish.

Here’s the thing: Tarnished into worthlessness though it may be, I suspect Trump needs peacemaker credentials to claim he has successfully solved the Dilemma of the Pacifist Lion. A strong man who made good times. A President who prepared for war only because he wanted peace.

Obama, despite the actual shadow violence of his administration globally, which inaugurated the era of drones-and-missiles warfare we’re now deep into, did not actually need the prize. Since he did not face the dilemma of credibly posing as a pacifist lion. Being given the prize was neither useful, nor necessary, for his agenda. It was merely embarrassing and awkward.

If the Dilemma of the Pacifist Lion helps explain why Trump wants the prize (beyond mimetic envy), it also helps explain why he is not going to get it.

As Presidential records of international peace-making and war-making go, Trump will probably end his tenure with a record that’s par for the course. In this one dimension he’s not going to be exceptionally good or bad, because the global war-and-peace machine is too complex, and has too much memory and inertia, to be either bombed or sermonized into a state of lasting peace. But based on a record of actions alone, it’s not that he would be a particularly undeserving candidate for the prize as a US president.

But the prize, when awarded to a political leader, is obviously not just about the record of the administrative machine he oversees, in isolation, but about the kind of story you’re trying to tell about that machine’s actions. It is essentially a prize for foxes, by foxes, for starring in well-told foxy stories. Stories that typically try to cloak records of violence out of a sense of shame, rather than brag about them as marks of macho credibility (iirc Trump typed BOMB in capitals in his Truth Social post about the mission).

Lions, whether befuddled by dilemmas or not, do not tell, or star in, stories scripted for foxes.

The little farce around Trump’s Nobel yearnings of course, is not important in itself. But it is important for understanding the nature of the dilemma, and the nature of the sorts of histories leaders script, in trying to resolve it.

That is the sort of the history we’re seeing now. A world that lusts for war while fetishizing peace. A world where strength and restraint must be signaled through unrestrained spectacles of weakness. A world that is slowly slipping past governability. A world where theaters of power and control must grow stronger and louder even as capacity for action grows weaker.

It is not a world created or curated by Trump alone. Many lion-mode leaders helped meme it into existence. It is a world that was perhaps the inevitable successor to the fox-mode world that came just before. A world of iron fists in velvet gloves, soothing narratives that precluded alternatives, and the realities of technological evolution resting on fictions of human perfectibility.

But like the world that came before, this world too is ultimately going to be transient. The A-plot of lions roaring and dropping big bombs in order to make a dent in the universe will give way once again to a different sort of world that runs on a different sort of logic. Perhaps us foxes, currently languishing in the B-plot tales of our own decline, will rise again.

Or perhaps we’ll all morph, with AI assistance, into entirely different sorts of critters, better adapted to the strange new rules of the Permaweird. We humans, after all, predictably and repeatedly regress to our mean every time history tempts us into reaching for a higher nature.

But who says we have to remain human through this next chapter?