Trump can no longer count on the unswerving loyalty of his followers
When imperial projects go awry
“Napoleon looked up and down the river, dismounted, and sat down on a log that lay on the bank,” Leo Tolstoy wrote. Handed a telescope, he peered at the far shore.
The year was 1812 and the Emperor of France was commanding his Grande Armée, the largest military force ever seen in Europe. The plan was to cross the Nieman River and invade Russia. Napoleon mumbled an order for the cavalry to find a ford enabling them to safely reach the other side.
In one of the most vivid scenes in War and Peace, Tolstoy added that a Polish colonel, “a handsome old man, flushed and fumbling in his speech from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be permitted to swim the river with his Uhlans [light cavalry] instead of seeking a ford. In evident fear of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on a horse, he begged to be allowed to swim across the river before the Emperor’s eyes. The aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor would not be displeased at this excess of zeal.”
Then “the old mustached officer, with happy face and sparkling eyes, raised his saber, shouted ‘Vivat!’ and … spurred his horse and galloped into the river… heading for the deepest part where the current was swift.” His lancers charged ahead into the cold, turbulent water. According to War and Peace, some 40 of them would drown in the river, a bad omen for the military campaign that lay ahead.
In real life, the troops who followed Napoleon across the Nieman were decimated by his foolhardy invasion. The army was reduced from an estimated 612,000 to 112,000 as its supply lines stretched hundreds of miles too far to feed the troops and stave off disease. Although Napoleon reached Moscow, the capital had been abandoned and would be burned by the Russians. He left behind the remnants of his army and rushed back to France to stave off a coup.
The price of extreme loyalty to a leader can be fearsomely high — not only for rank-and-file followers but also for the cause to which they pledge allegiance. Eventually, leaders like Napoleon discover that such loyalty has an expiration date.
We’ve seen evidence of catastrophic hubris and unwarranted zeal in many places and times. It recently played out in a bizarre plan for the world’s largest real estate development in Saudi Arabia. It may be powering the inconceivably grand ambitions of the biggest players in the AI datacenter boom. And it is driving the imperial visions of President Donald Trump, as he builds a gigantic White House ballroom and plans a triumphal marble arch across the Potomac River, facing the Lincoln Memorial. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club held a Great Gatsby-themed party as he withheld food stamp funds and sloughed off the cost-of-living concerns that carried Democrats into office in the off year election.
That election and the forthcoming House vote on releasing files concerning sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are demonstrating that Trump can no longer count on the unswerving loyalty of formerly devoted followers in his party.
In 1806, Napoleon decreed the construction of a triumphal arch to commemorate his Grande Armée. But he didn’t live to see its completion. The doomed invasion of Russia pierced the notion of Napoleon’s invincibility — and led to his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815.
The Arc de Triomphe was eventually completed in 1836 and dedicated to the armies of the French Revolution and Empire. Today the arch still stands at the center of the Place de L’Etoile, where 12 avenues converge in a dizzying swirl of traffic.
The MBS fantasy
Neom, the new city planned by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was conceived on a staggering scale.
A building roughly 125 stories high would extend for 105 miles through the desert, from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Hejaz mountains. It was called the Line and designed as a mirror-covered steel structure. It would be so enormous, the Financial Times noted, that it “would block the migration routes through the mountains for several species of mammal. It also crosses a migratory route used by millions of birds flying south from Europe and Asia to overwinter in Africa, including endangered species such as the greater spotted eagle and European turtle dove.”
The price tag for Mohammed bin Salman’s dream city: $4.5 trillion, equivalent to what the entire German economy produces in a year.
According to the FT:
The centrepiece of The Line, a vast, glass-clad linear city in Saudi Arabia, was to be the “hidden marina”. The world’s largest cruise ships would glide through a gate as tall as London’s Shard over a deepwater harbour carved from the desert. Suspended above it, like a chandelier, a 30-storey glass-and-steel building would hang from the arch, a sci-fi vision dreamed up by a Hollywood art director. Even its designers warned that physics might not cooperate.
Aside from the many technical problems The Line posed for architects and contractors, the building called for an immense amount of steel, cement and other materials.
Three years ago, construction crews began working on the project, driving enormous piles into the sand and excavating land for tunnels. But as Neom’s impracticality became clear the Saudis have scaled back the plans. What will be salvaged from the venture? That remains to be seen.
The project’s internal workings resembled “Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes,” several people told the FT. “Dissent was ignored or punished, concerns failed to reach the leadership and adjusting course became impossible as the project started to go awry.”
When MBS came to look at architectural models:
“The underlying emotion that was felt in the room was fear, people would just mimic whatever he had to say,” said the planner. “MBS would arrive with his entourage of about 40-50 people. And as he walks around, there’s absolute silence.” At one point he would say that he liked something and “he would turn to his entourage and they’d all go, ‘love it’”. Then he would see something he didn’t like and his entourage would all shake their heads, tutting.
In any normal design and construction process, The Line would have been laughed out of consideration. But absolute power and blind loyalty made Neom seem a viable project for a few short years.
AI
Artificial intelligence isn’t a vanity project and there’s a business case to be made that AI could supercharge productivity. But its benefits so far have been far more modest than many executives have projected. Still, an enormous building spree is under way. The investment bank Morgan Stanley forecasts that $2.9 trillion in capital spending will be used to build data centers and power the expansion of AI from this year through 2028.
Open AI’s chief, Sam Altman, hasn’t been shy about the potential of AI:
The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. Many people will choose to live their lives in much the same way, but at least some people will probably decide to “plug in”.
Yet as the AI skeptic Gary Marcus noted, there is no clear path for Open AI to raise enough revenue to pay for $1.4 trillion in planned spending. The company’s chief financial officer recently argued that the government should back up the loans taken out by AI companies, setting off a furious reaction including a repudiation from the White House’s AI czar.
Altman disowned the idea of a potential government bailout for the AI industry. But as the value of its companies continues to grow to enormous scale in the stock market, the argument that they are “too big to fail” may be heard.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the company whose chips are powering much of AI, has raised the specter that the U.S. could “lose” the AI race to China. His comments fueled the idea that under the guise of national security, American taxpayers may one day have to foot the bill for the hyper-scaling of AI.
In the meantime, the markets are testing whether investors will remain loyal to the utopian visions of AI’s leading advocates.
Into the river
Tolstoy wrote that after plunging into the Nieman River, the Polish troops “caught hold of one another as they fell off their horses. Some of the horses were drowned and some of the men; the others tried to swim on, some in the saddle and some clinging to their horses’ manes. They tried to make their way forward to the opposite bank and, though there was a ford one third of a mile away, were proud that they were swimming and drowning in this river under the eyes of the man who sat on the log and was not even looking at what they were doing. “
“When the aide-de-camp…ventured to draw the Emperor’s attention to the devotion of the Poles to his person, the little man in the gray overcoat got up and, having summoned Berthier, began pacing up and down the bank with him, giving him instructions and occasionally glancing disapprovingly at the drowning Uhlans who distracted his attention.”
It was no surprise to Napoleon that his presence “was enough to dumbfound people and impel them to insane self-oblivion. He called for his horse and rode to his quarters.”
Later that day, the emperor directed that the Polish colonel, who survived the swim while many of his troops drowned, should be admitted into the Légion d’honneur.
This account of the crossing of the Nieman, like almost all of War and Peace, is fiction, loosely based on fact. A different story is told by Philippe-Paul de Ségur, a general on Napoleon’s staff, in his best-selling memoir.
In this version, there is no colonel begging to take an unnecessarily risky route across the Nieman. Instead, the Polish lancers are following the emperor’s order to ford the stream when they discover that the water is too deep. It wasn’t vainglory that condemned them but bad judgment.
“They swam together to the middle of the stream, but there the swift current swept them apart. Then their horses took fright. Helplessly adrift, they were carried along by the violence of the current….their riders splashed and floundered in vain. Their strength failed, and they finally gave up the struggle.”
Ségur added, “As they were about to go down, they turned toward Napoleon and shouted: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ We noticed three in particular who, their mouths still above water, repeated the cheer and immediately sank. The army was gripped with horror and admiration.” (Other accounts suggest that Ségur exaggerated the details of the incident.)
Never retreat
In his introduction to an English translation of Ségur’s book, the journalist Mark Danner highlights some words from Napoleon that are echoed in the attitude of President Trump.
“In affairs of state,” Napoleon told one of his ministers, “one must never retreat, never retrace one’s steps, never admit an error.”
But Napoleon, realizing the enormity of his disastrous Russian invasion, also lamented prophetically, “What a frightful succession of perilous conflicts will begin with my first backward step!”
As Adolph Hitler would in the 20th Century, Napoleon saw his invasion of Russia as an enterprise too big to fail. “Only success could prevent disaster,” Danner wrote. “So how could success not come? The magnitude of the stakes should not blind us to the similarities to other such gambles, undertaken in the conviction that shock and awe must produce nothing less than the triumph sought, for the alternative…was simply inconceivable.”
Tolstoy’s verdict on the beginning of the French invasion of Russia was rendered in Latin: Quos vult perdere dementat.
Those whom a god wishes to destroy he first drives mad.
