Schadenfreude, used in English, has a suggestion of the vague shame associated with the emotion, it’s a guilty pleasure. And intensely so in the case of Trump and the US debacle in the Iran War. Thousands have died, vast damage has been done to the everyday life of Iran and Lebanon, and the chaotic situation may escalate to the next level of weapons and destruction. But, my God. My God! What an absolute assertion of the facts of the world, of American fantasies of power. What is occurring is really a double-levelled thing. Trump filled his second administration with American suprematists and Christian nationalists, whose vision is a conservative double to the ‘new American century’ push, which got America into Iraq and Afghanistan. But Trump himself is transactional, and wrapped in a world of televisual fantasies. So his fierce clash-of-civilisation warriors must follow his dailymanoeuvres, from demanding unconditional surrender to announcing the war is already won. This is Trump the property developer on full view. He was less an actual builder of things than an unceasing manufacturer of spin and image. Through that, he persuaded bankrupt cities to give him tax credits and support, as part of their own rebranding. Occasionally things would actually get built. But beyond a certain point, he simply licensed his name and brand to tower builders. The manner in which the war has gripped the United States, rather than vice-versa, is a payout few expected.
The necessity to ‘tame’ Iran being urged from all sides has less to do with any progress towards alleged nuclear weapons than with the world’s dependence on oil, and Iran’s ability to control its carriage. As numerous commentators have noted, this is not prompted by US need for that oil, now superseded by domestic US production and Canadian exports, but by China’s continued need for it.
That reveals a wider truth: everything being urged on us as a ‘necessity’ is a result of the path human history has taken, or been taken on. Relentless Western growth of a certain type—with the developing world and Global South keen on imitating it—combined with the post-Cold War push to globalisation, the triumph of the doctrine of ‘comparative advantage’, and the positive disdain for self-sufficiency has given the contingency of the natural world its power over us. Paradoxically, in the ‘high neoliberal era’ of the 1990s, we were told that we were finally slipping out of millennia of dominance over us by nature, to finally emerge into freedom.
Putting aside the environmental folly of this myth, popular criticism of globalisation only began to collapse about a decade ago in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. But only in a limited sense: by imagining that the way of life we have could simply be continued by rebuilding national capacity. This was what Trump sold to the public in 2016, and again, more programmatically, in 2024. It is what all the European illiberal Right, and One Nation in Australia, are offering.
With sufficient political will, command and public support, national capacity could be rebuilt. But, the idea that this could be done at present, and our existing way of life maintained, is a fantasy. Some things are true, even though David Ricardo says they’re true, and one of them is that free trade and comparative advantage can supercharge growth in politically favourable conditions beyond the capacity for localised production to compete.I In the great age of protection in the twentieth century, that was always understood. Protection regimes, often pushed by labour and the Centre-Left, accepted a certain modesty of life as part of the trade-off for the security and solidarity of a national economy that could produce practically everything it needed for a reasonable existence.
Few have understood the degree to which in the last four decades we have passed from a world in which such modesty was, knowingly or otherwise, assumed, to one in which global production has given a vast range of people access to elective and luxury goods at affordable prices. All it has taken to throw that into ever greater uncertainty has been a partial war around one waterway.
The notion that we could achieve a revived self-sufficiency—as new Nationals leader Matt Canavan is pitching—without an accompanying cultural shift in widespread expectations in life is ridiculous. Society was atomising anyway over previous decades. Globalisation’s provision of cheap luxuries—entertainment as well as objects—has only exacerbated that. The new populist parties of the Right promise a suture to that rip in their mobilisation of symbols and culture wars, but they are yet to reckon with the source of the wound.
Meanwhile, China, under Communist Party leadership, has never abandoned the goal of economic autarchy. For all the layers of markets and consumption built above it, China’s base strategy remains that of Global South Marxism, as drawn from Lenin’s Imperialism. Nationalism and strategic withdrawal from the global system is radical if done to escape the structural inequality of an imperial system. China has used a steady patriotism in its development to steer the uneven distribution of prosperity—and to have a backstop of collective feeling if that prosperity falters. Recently, it has focused on supercharged automation as the latest version of that autarchy, something of a departure, or supplement, to its earlier Belt and Road strategy. Supercharging every aspect of automation and tech, China has been running as fast as it can to self-sustaining renewables, powering an automation attacking the very rule of labour itself. The United States has, perhaps belatedly, noticed China’s race to end its dependence on oil, and thus started its own race to cut it off at the strait.
In Australia, Labor has, probably correctly, identified that there is littel appetite in much of Australia for the changes entailed in a re-orientation to national independence in economy and defence. The total commitment to AUKUS was one answer to that; the proposal of the ‘Made in Australia’ policy had very little to do with increasing self-sufficiency and much to do with developing new export industries: a deeper commitment to a globalised economy. The current crisis has called time on lip-service to self-sufficiency (or reduced self-insufficiency) by both mainstream and populist parties. The absence of mobilisation—by trade unions, or collective voluntary bodies—shows that the public cannot re-conceive of life as meaningful without the intense levels of consumption that the passage of oil through one narrow strait depends upon. It has taken Donald Trump’s blundering, self-fashioning and lassitude with respect to the apocalyptic intent of his underlings to force the issue. History in a hairpiece once again.
The truth is that, in the West, nationalism itself cannot supply sufficient collective meaning to a self-sufficiency project that would cushion any change in individualised, desire-centred life. The arrival of a genuine emergency, for which the sudden crunch of this war is mere prelude, may produce a renewed solidarity based on pure survival.
But only a longer lasting and deeper change in what life is—regarding production, work, social connection and how these may be knitted together—will produce a more fully human way of life on which mutual, respectful independence of communities can be based. Not only is this the path back to a restored and replenished human existence, and the only way to curb the ecological crisis, it is also the only possible platform for a lasting peace. If we make it to the other side of this period of our history.
What could be more hubristic, than schadenfreude at hubris?