Too Great for Any One Man
Guillaume A. W. Attia
03 Apr 2026 — 10 min read
‘‘Of late most Wars have been declar’d from the Mouths of Canons, before any formal Declaration.’’ Were he alive today, Sir Robert Walpole might wince at the latest instance of this enduring fashion. In 2020, President Trump authorized the assasination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. According to Gene Healy, a senior policy expert at the Cato Institute, this attack ‘‘marked the first time an American president publicly ordered the assassination of a top government official of a country we were not legally at war with. It was also a major usurpation of congressional power’’ (The Cult of the Presidency, xiii). The Trump administration has now raised the ante with the outright elimination of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, and Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammad Pakpour.
No discernible principle of restraint can be found in these drastic actions, save personal ambition: ‘‘My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,’’ says the president. While the president acts, in good royal fashion, according to his own pleasure, top military officers are propelled by religious fervor. According to a report by The Guardian newspaper, military officers have been told that the Iran plan is ‘‘all part of God’s divine plan’’ to usher in ‘‘the imminent return of Jesus Christ’’ and the ‘‘End Times.’’
It has become customary to lament the paranoiac elements of American politics. All kinds of cranks episodically capture the attention and fascination of the American public with grand, frightful, tales of a secret cabal of ultra-rich subversives bent on enslaving the masses and subjugating them to their dehumanizing vision of world order. Richard Hofstadter famously described this ‘‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’’ as paranoid in style (The Paranoid Style in American Politics, p. 3). This intemperate way of going about the business of politics has rightly been sanctioned by the liberal intelligentsia, but to the detriment of other more healthful forms of public neurotism.
As Gordon Wood notes in his classic study of the American Revolution, the cause of liberty was activated and nurtured by a ‘‘heightened language of intense liberalism and paranoiac mistrust of power’’ (The Creation of the American Republic, p. 17). The framers of the constitution were raised in a culture where every ‘‘accumulation of political power, however tiny and piecemeal, was seen as frighteningly tyrannical, viewed as some sinister plot to upset the delicately maintained relationships of power and jealousy’’ (The Creation of the American Republic, p. 16).
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https://www.liberalcurrents.com/too-great-for-any-one-man/