A Triumphal Arch That Shoots Back

A triumphal arch that stores weapons and can launch snipers and drones is a very modern jest of fortune. President Trump announces that his planned, 250‑foot arch, bridging Washington, D.C. and Virginia near Arlington, will now house a “top grade military complex,” able to deploy force “for National Security purposes,” at the request of the military itself. Thus a symbol of glory becomes also an instrument of war. I pay no attention to the sermons that will follow about beauty, taste, or sacrilege. As I wrote in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, those who chase how one ought to live rather than how one does live “sooner effect their ruin than their preservation.”

What, then, is done here? A ruler is already building a massive arch across the Potomac, a visible bridge between the capital and the dead of Arlington. This could have remained pure spectacle: stone, lights, speeches, nothing more dangerous than pigeons. Instead he agrees to convert it into a complex to store military equipment, with positions for snipers and bases for drones. He gives the act a pious name — national security — and a pious alibi — the request of the military. But the effectual truth is that he is embedding arms into architecture, so that honor and force share the same pedestal.

When I warned princes against mercenaries in The Prince, I argued that a ruler must rely on his own arms, not on those of others, if he wishes to stand firm. Here the arms are literally his own: a permanent complex on his own soil, tied to his own monumental project, not a loan from an ally or a favor from a faction. This is good prudence if the times are rough, for as I compared fortune to a raging river, she overwhelms those who built no dykes in fair weather. A fixed site that can host snipers and drones is such a dyke: ugly to some eyes, but more solid than a speech.

There is also calculation in the mixture of marble and muskets. Most men judge “by the eyes rather than the hands,” as I observed, and this arch will fill the eye: 250 feet of triumph, visible from both shores, crowning the approach to a capital already full of symbols. Yet now those who look must remember that behind the stone there are weapons, that under the rhetoric of honor there is a console from which a drone may rise. Appearance and force are joined so that each strengthens the other: honor justifies arms; arms make honor feared. This is the craft that unarmed prophets lack when they are adored one day and torn apart the next.

Still, the feared‑and‑loved account must be done carefully. In The Prince I wrote that “it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with,” but added that a ruler must avoid hatred. An arch that can shoot into the distance may frighten foreign enemies; an arch that seems aimed at the ruler’s own people may instead breed hatred. It is one thing if citizens see in this complex a shield against distant threats; it is another if they imagine its snipers turned toward them, its drones hovering above their assemblies. Fear that guards the laws is useful; fear that shadows every public square is the seed of conspiracy.

Here the republican in me wakes up. In the Discourses on Livy, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, I noted that founders of states must assume “all men are bad” when unchecked, and must build orders that channel this into harmless uses. That logic applies to soldiers as much as to citizens. To place a military complex at the edge of a capital is ordinary; to wrap it in the robes of a civic triumph, to fuse the commemoration of victories with the means of new violences, is a sharper innovation. In a corrupt city, arms leaning too closely upon ceremonies can accelerate decay, for every festival becomes a kind of parade ground and every monument a potential redoubt.

Yet I will not call the move foolish. It is bold, not a middle course. The ruler sees rising tensions abroad and perhaps storms at home; he anticipates necessity by armoring his own monument before the waters of fortune rise. If he maintains good laws with these good arms — keeps the complex under firm civil control, uses it credibly for defense, and avoids the daily harassment of his own people — he will have increased his security and his glory in a single stroke. If he lets it become a standing threat against the republic itself, then this arch, built to cross a river, will instead mark the crossing from liberty into servitude. Power that hides in stone is still power, and power that forgets its limits is always one step from ruin.