In an age of unrelenting and seemingly accelerating demands on one’s attention, knowing what to reserve outrage for is becoming one of life’s most difficult challenges. Never has this been more apparent than in the wake of the last week or so’s political news from the United States.
The latest onslaught began with the spectacle of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who strutted about last Thursday as he announced his plans to livestream the execution by firing squad of a former U.S. military officer convicted by court-martial and sentenced to death for the terrorist murder of 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood in 2009.
In an age of unrelenting and seemingly accelerating demands on one’s attention, knowing what to reserve outrage for is becoming one of life’s most difficult challenges. Never has this been more apparent than in the wake of the last week or so’s political news from the United States.
The latest onslaught began with the spectacle of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who strutted about last Thursday as he announced his plans to livestream the execution by firing squad of a former U.S. military officer convicted by court-martial and sentenced to death for the terrorist murder of 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood in 2009.
It is not clear whether Hegseth, a man who seems to take crudeness as a virtue, researched the history of state executions before going public with this plan. If he had, he would have quickly learned two things that would give a sensible and morally informed defense secretary pause: The U.S. military hasn’t performed a public execution in 90 years, and the countries that continue to enact rituals like these, such as Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban, head the list of nations that the United States has long routinely deplored as barbaric. Credit Hegseth for understanding his boss, though. Asked if he supported public executions, U.S. President Donald Trump replied with a single word: “Absolutely.”
A day after Hegseth’s announcement, following the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to select the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, as its latest peace laureate, the Trump administration slammed Norway for the choice and announced that it would take punitive actions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), where Pillay had once served as a judge. Trump complained that Pillay had been plucked from obscurity and said that he was the person who deserved the prize most for having ended eight wars around the world.
Here, the outrages compound themselves. Norway may be where the committee is based, but it does not decide the prize winners. Pillay is far from unknown, especially for anyone who values international human rights. And Trump’s peacemaking claims are as dubious as any of the lies and distortions of fact that routinely pepper his public comments.
Beyond the U.S. president’s bottomless neediness and thirst for recognition, Washington’s outrage against Pillay seems largely based on her leadership of a U.N. commission that reviewed Israel’s post-Oct. 7, 2023, offensive in Gaza, concluding that the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the wholesale devastation of the territory’s housing and infrastructure had constituted a genocide. One can only read between the lines in trying to discern the true motivations behind the timing of the newly announced U.S. sanctions against the ICC, but it appears to be retaliation for Pillay sharing information from the U.N. commission with the ICC, which has issued arrest warrants for Israeli politicians, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This was certainly Netanyahu’s sense of things, for he promptly congratulated the Trump administration for its actions against the ICC.
For a long time now, in the aftermath of Hamas’s barbaric and murderous attack that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and took approximately 250 hostage three years ago, both the Biden and Trump administrations have failed their ally Israel by neither forcefully condemning nor effectively restraining its military actions in Gaza that were hugely disproportionate and grossly indiscriminate.
One can debate the label genocide, but to single out the ICC and Pillay is both self-defeating and immoral. A wide array of groups and experts, many of them Jewish and some Israeli, have reached similar conclusions about a genocide in Gaza. The United States has never articulated a coherent, substantive response to this, seeming to think that it is sufficient to say that Israel is its ally and friend. This amounts to an abandonment of U.S. values—something the country once staked its international standing on, even if it frequently fell short of its own high-sounding ideals.
Beyond conflicting views about Israel and Palestine, though, the United States attack on the ICC, like its hostility toward the U.N. and its rapidly eroding commitment to other global institutions and norms, is pushing the world in a dangerous direction, where rules matter less and less and naked might is given precedence over considerations of what is principled, or right.
Further evidence of this shift, not drift, can also be seen in Trump’s extraordinarily crude transactional moves toward Russia and Ukraine in recent days. Worried that persistently high diesel and gasoline prices in the United States will imperil his party’s chances in the upcoming midterm elections, Trump suspended sanctions on Moscow to hastily arrange a fuel delivery deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This will boost Russian revenues at a time when its war of aggression in Ukraine has begun crippling its economy.
Trump also denounced Ukraine, the victim in this conflict, for defending itself by attacking Russia’s petroleum infrastructure. It didn’t matter to him that these were reprisals for Russia’s savage and much more systematic attacks on Ukraine’s energy systems and economy. Trump, who has long displayed a poorly explained attraction to Putin, responded to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s complaints about the Trump-Putin deal by saying it was time for Ukraine to replace its leader, a long-standing Russian demand.
The most recent outrage is geopolitically minor but speaks just as powerfully to the moral rot in Washington. That is the scandal surrounding the newly resigned U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Even the Trump administration couldn’t overlook the discrediting appearance of an envoy who has been accused of soliciting payment from a political fundraiser in exchange for facilitating high-level access to the U.S. government. Guilfoyle claims her innocence. The evidence against her, as first reported in the Wall Street Journal, includes text messages that seem to clearly point to a pay-to-play deal.
If she committed the acts she is accused of, Guilfoyle is hardly alone in her greed and audacity. As I have written before, corruption is the defining characteristic of this administration, one in which diplomatic envoys such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff pursue private business deals in the very countries where they are negotiating. Not to mention that one of Trump’s sons recently accepted a gift from a shadowy Russian oligarch to finance his lavish post-wedding party in the Caribbean. The man, said to be close to Putin, scarcely speaks English, yet Donald Trump Jr.’s representatives initially described him as a close friend.
If, taken together, things like these seem to bespeak U.S. decline, there is yet one more incident that does so even more loudly: the pervasive self-congratulation and denial emanating from today’s Washington. This could be heard clearly in the mishmash of a speech that Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, gave in Athens last week. In it, he strung together a middle school student’s gloss of the greatest hits of Western civilization, as he claimed the United States to be a direct descendant of ancient Greece and a paragon of Western ideals that span from that civilization’s early democracy to the Enlightenment.
Rubio’s worst pretension, though, was to speak to Europe as if the United States under Trump serves as an inspiring model for that continent. “We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago,” Rubio said, standing with the Parthenon glowing in the background.
Europeans may still share a proverbial bed with the United States, but it is hard to imagine that their dreams could be more different. Instead, many are hoping that a United States that increasingly appears lost and valueless can rediscover what they have admired in it throughout much of its history before it is too late.