Nothing, My Lord

On 29 August, Vladimir Putin told a room of schoolteachers that killer whales hunt polar bears in packs and eat them, his phrase, "like minnows." No marine biologist recognises the claim. Several have traced it to the fabricated animal footage that circulates online. Eitherway, nobody in that room corrected him.

Donald Trump has managed something similar, but in instalments rather than one sitting. Asked how long the war he started in Iran would last, he predicted four to five weeks, then six. Months later, with the fighting still going, he said it could end in "two weeks, maybe three," deal or no deal. He has described the war as substantially ahead of schedule and still under way within the same week, occasionally within the same sentence.

Neither of these is offered as a diagnosis. The Goose is not qualified to provide one, and the attempt usually says more about the writer than the subject. What's worth taking seriously is the pattern: two men whose public account of events and the events themselves have drifted steadily apart.

Both started a war that nobody much wanted. Putin's is now well into its fifth year. Trump's, against Iran, is not yet one, having opened in February with strikes he said would meet their objectives inside a month. Neither seems to have had a particularly accurate model of how it would go, at the outset or since, and neither appears to have revised it in any way visible from outside.

There is a name for one piece of this. Economists who study rulers with unchecked power call it the dictator's dilemma: a leader, whose displeasure is expensive enough that nobody volunteers to be its cause, stops hearing the version of events that displeases him. But that's only the courtiers' half of it. The other half is older and doesn't require a court at all. Enough power, held for long enough, lets a person believe whichever account flatters him, because there is nothing left in his world that requires him to check it against anything else.

Shakespeare had it first, and said it better. Lear asks his daughters to price their love. Two daughters pay in the currency he's buying. But Cordelia says nothing, and is disinherited for the offence of accuracy. He keeps the two who flatter him and keeps their version of the kingdom too. By the time the storm comes, he is on a heath arguing with the weather, having built the isolation himself, one grateful audience at a time. What's striking, rereading it now, isn't the cruelty. It's the ordinariness. Nobody in Lear's court thinks of themselves as lying. They are simply telling him what keeps them in the room.

Decline, on this reading, isn't a mind failing. It's a performance that has stopped answering to its own audience. Lear doesn't stop behaving like a king the moment he gives the kingdom away. He keeps his hundred knights, expects the same deference, the same room at the same hour, and is genuinely wounded when his daughters start totting up what all that costs them. His authority is already gone. The performance of it, and his own belief in it, carries on regardless.

Brussels has no court of flatterers. If anything it has the opposite difficulty: everything said there gets minuted, argued over by two dozen governments who mostly disagree, and eventually written down. That isn't a failure of information. It's the entire design. But it produces its own exposure. An adversary who no longer has an accurate model of the war he started is dangerous precisely because nobody, including him, can say with confidence what he does next. An institution built to answer to its own citizens will always, by comparison, be readable. That predictability is a genuine democratic virtue, and Europe shouldn't apologise for it. Set against opponents whose next move even they may not be able to forecast it, is also a real strategic cost, and pretending otherwise doesn't make it smaller.

Cordelia's honesty cost her a kingdom. Her father never did find out what his flattery had actually built, and by the time anyone told him plainly, there was nothing left of Lear to hear it. His enemies did not need to defeat him. They needed only to wait, and to still be standing when he finally ran out of court. That is roughly the position Europe finds itself in now, whether or not anyone in Brussels would put it that way. Its opponents are unpredictable in ways that eventually run out from under them. Its own difficulty is that predictability was designed to be a virtue, not a plan, and nobody yet knows whether simply outlasting this performance will count as one.