Reckless Talk Is Not Strength: On Threatening Your Own Cities

The scene is ugly but simple. At a rally, the president, in defending his war on Iran as necessary to “keep the world safe,” muses that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, calling such destruction a “very small price to pay.” The crowd laughs and cheers. California leaders do not. They call the words “deranged and dangerous,” speak of “reckless war talk,” and even set a State Threat Assessment Center to watch whether foreign actors treat the remark as an invitation. The White House then insists he only meant that, without his earlier war, those cities would have been threatened. The palace says prudence; the provinces hear contempt.

When I wrote in The Prince that we must look to the effectual truth of things, I meant precisely this kind of moment. The intention he now claims is one thing; the words that passed his lips before a roaring crowd are another. The effectual truth is that a ruler publicly signaled that two great cities of his own republic, with millions of inhabitants and key military bases, can be spoken of as expendable. A prudent prince may have to sacrifice towns in war; he never jokes that their ruin is a “small price,” because words train subjects to expect deeds.

Another truth: a leader’s first interest is to maintain the state and so to maintain himself. He presents this war as the bulwark that keeps his homeland safe from a nuclear Iran. Thus the talk of destroyed cities is meant to retroactively justify blood and treasure already spent, and to steel the people for costs still to come. But maintenance requires a certain distribution of fear. You direct fear outward to unify your people against a foreign enemy. You do not invite that enemy, even in jest, to strike your own, or speak in ways that might be read as license. Fear pointed inward becomes fury.

In The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, I argued that it is safer to be feared than loved, but that a prince must avoid being hated. The distinction is not subtle. Fear rests on the belief that the ruler can and will punish enemies of the common safety; hatred arises when citizens believe he despises them, or would gamble with their lives to magnify his own glory. Here, when Californians hear that their cities are a “small price to pay,” they are invited to believe that their suffering would be an acceptable offering on the altar of a distant war. This does not increase fear of Iran; it cultivates hatred of the speaker.

One sees also a failure to understand appearances as arms. The White House calls the backlash a “media freakout” and denounces a newspaper as “buffoons.” This is to mistake mockery for mastery. In my time, mercenary soldiers were unreliable arms; they served for pay and abandoned you when fortune turned. Today, a ruler who leans too heavily on partisan media and cheering crowds as his only shield has merely hired new mercenaries. Real arms are durable institutions and a broad reservoir of trust across cities, parties, and offices. When governors and mayors feel obliged to guard against their own prince’s tongue, your auxiliaries have begun to turn their spears.

There is, of course, an argument in his favor. War is ugly; those who command it must sometimes speak in harsh arithmetic, weighing thousands here against millions there. A defender might say he only dramatized the stakes: without decisive action abroad, catastrophe at home. This has some color of necessity. Yet in Discourses on Livy, as translated by Ninian Hill Thomson, I argued that free cities endure by honoring their great towns and listening to their people. A republican leader who believes Los Angeles and San Diego can be treated as theater props, while Nebraskans applaud, is amusing himself with the very divisions that will later paralyze his counsels.

Fortuna plays her part. The same remark that draws cheers in one hall can, by morning, provoke governors to speak of “dangerous – if not treasonous” words and to call in threat centers. But as I wrote of fortune as a flooding river, it is the dykes and barriers built in calm weather that determine how much damage the waters do. A prudent ruler, knowing his history of calling American cities “blood-soaked killing fields” and sending unwanted troops, would speak of those cities now as jewels to be guarded, not chips to be wagered. The times demand seriousness; the man offers banter. That mismatch is how princes slide, step by step, from power into precarity.

uncertainty_note":"What I cannot yet see is whether this episode marks a true turning of hearts against him, or merely another passing flood that the existing dykes, however cracked, still manage to hold."}```}**