Former Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe won the big prize in the country’s national lottery in 2000. He won for a simple reason: because he could. Once you destroy institutions constraining your power, as Mugabe did during his 37-year reign, you can rule for personal enrichment, personal aggrandizement or simply personal entertainment. What better way to demonstrate unconstrained power than showing that the existing system of rules is a farce? The damage such behavior can do to norms and institutions is part of the design.
Mugabe’s lottery echoes through two recent decisions taken by US President Donald Trump’s administration, both of which advance an agenda that seeks to remove all constraints on Trump and his allies’ future behavior.
The first decision was to launch a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran and kill the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Leaving aside the loss of life and the immediate chaos, it should be obvious that the attack would trigger a long period of instability in the Middle East.
Illustration: Mountain People
To be sure, the Iranian regime was repressive, murderous and bad for Iranians’ economic and social well-being. Khamenei, leading elites and the feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had blood on their hands, including the killing and arrest of tens of thousands of protesters just since the beginning of the year.
However, none of this justifies initiating a new war in the Middle East that lacks support from international allies or any kind of domestic buy-in. The US is still considered a democracy where people’s views should in principle matter, but with Trump risking regionwide carnage, the democratic veneer appears thinner by the day.
No matter how awful Khamenei’s track record was, he was no Nicolas Maduro, who had only a few die-hard supporters even in Venezuela’s military by the time Trump intervened to capture him in January.
There will be no puppet regime in Iran, where state institutions and nationalist feeling are strong. When the Shah’s regime collapsed in the face of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the state apparatus remained largely intact and transferred its allegiance to the new Islamic republic.
That state apparatus will now defend Iranian interests and seek to use the country’s proxies to destabilize other countries. This might even give a new lease on life to proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which have been gravely weakened since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel.
Moreover, by virtue of his religious role, Khamenei enjoyed respect and authority among Shiite Muslims at home, where they constitute a huge majority of the population, and abroad. For many, his killing makes him a martyr — the last thing Iran or the region needs.
Trump’s other dangerous and destabilizing decision, which immediately preceded the first, was to designate the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic as a supply-chain risk. That designation, typically reserved for companies from foreign adversaries, such as China’s Huawei, bars federal contractors from using Anthropic’s models and heralds major restrictions on what the company can do in the future.
“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Friday last week.
The reason? Anthropic wanted safeguards against its models being used for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapon systems. Neither provision would have placed meaningful restrictions on the defense department in practice. Indeed, mass surveillance of US citizens is illegal under US law and autonomous weapon systems are not a near-term possibility, but for Trump and Hegseth, it is the showdown and intimidation of Anthropic that matter. They must demonstrate that they can do as they please, just like Mugabe.
However, unlike Zimbabwe’s rigged lottery, the Anthropic decision would have major consequences, perhaps more far-reaching than the attack on Iran. Regardless of what one thinks of current AI capabilities, there is little doubt that who controls AI in the future would have momentous implications for democracy, business, communication and privacy. Many in the industry might interpret the Anthropic ban to mean that the US government, not the private sector, would control AI.
Winner-take-all dynamics (whether real or perceived) had already driven the competition between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to fever pitch. Within hours of the Anthropic announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rushed to cut a deal with the defense department — a deal signaling that this competition is about to reach dangerous new heights. Altman is willing to give Hegseth everything Anthropic refused, including capabilities to contravene US law and willingness to work on autonomous weapon systems.
The implications of the action against Anthropic could be even more far-reaching. This administration, and perhaps future administrations, can now impose hugely disproportionate penalties on any contractor they disagree with. The security of private property rights is now looking much shakier.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has signaled to the world that it is intent on mass surveillance and the development of autonomous weapon systems (why else bother about these two ineffective provisions in the contract?).
Trump has arguably achieved Mugabe-level absurdity with his military attack on Iran and legal attack on Anthropic. A president who came to power promising no new foreign entanglements, especially in the Middle East, has launched a potentially riskier one than the Iraq War a generation ago — and with even flimsier justification. A president who rails against “socialism” and “far-left Democrats” uses the state to crush a private company.
However, in both cases, the absurdity is the point — as it was for Mugabe. The shock value and trampling of norms embody Trump’s personal and political credo: Rules are for suckers.
Daron Acemoglu, a 2024 Nobel laureate in economics and institute professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is coauthor of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on April 9 said that the first group of Indian workers could arrive as early as this year as part of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India and the India Taipei Association. Signed in February 2024, the MOU stipulates that Taipei would decide the number of migrant workers and which industries would employ them, while New Delhi would manage recruitment and training. Employment would be governed by the laws of both countries. Months after its signing, the two sides agreed that 1,000 migrant workers from India would
In recent weeks, Taiwan has witnessed a surge of public anxiety over the possible introduction of Indian migrant workers. What began as a policy signal from the Ministry of Labor quickly escalated into a broader controversy. Petitions gathered thousands of signatures within days, political figures issued strong warnings, and social media became saturated with concerns about public safety and social stability. At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward policy question: Should Taiwan introduce Indian migrant workers or not? However, this framing is misleading. The current debate is not fundamentally about India. It is about Taiwan’s labor system, its
On March 31, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released declassified diplomatic records from 1995 that drew wide domestic media attention. One revelation stood out: North Korea had once raised the possibility of diplomatic relations with Taiwan. In a meeting with visiting Chinese officials in May 1995, as then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) prepared for a visit to South Korea, North Korean officials objected to Beijing’s growing ties with Seoul and raised Taiwan directly. According to the newly released records, North Korean officials asked why Pyongyang should refrain from developing relations with Taiwan while China and South Korea were expanding high-level
Japan’s imminent easing of arms export rules has sparked strong interest from Warsaw to Manila, Reuters reporting found, as US President Donald Trump wavers on security commitments to allies, and the wars in Iran and Ukraine strain US weapons supplies. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s ruling party approved the changes this week as she tries to invigorate the pacifist country’s military industrial base. Her government would formally adopt the new rules as soon as this month, three Japanese government officials told Reuters. Despite largely isolating itself from global arms markets since World War II, Japan spends enough on its own
RSS