by Jeroen Bouterse
Can you be betrayed by Donald Trump? If the Republican party indeed pays in seats for the war it watched its leader wage, it appears the reason is not the principled refusal of the American public to put up with authoritarian politics, but the perceived violation of its natural right to low fuel prices – the breaking of the president’s sacred promise to use his awesome powers only to hurt others. To call that a betrayal would be melodramatic; that concept derives all its force from a plausible prior belief in someone’s faithfulness or minimal ability to honor agreements, contracts, or oaths of office.
Embarrassing to know this, and then still to experience a pang of betrayal myself, on reading about the United States government’s deal with Vladimir Putin. A deal allowing Russia to fund its bloody war of aggression against Ukraine, and allowing the US president a long shot at a flimsy alternative narrative concerning fuel price levels. Not thirty, but two or three pieces of silver; or as the Economist commented, “never in the field of human conflict was so much risked by one man for so little.”
Hoping to resolve my confusion, I consulted an essay collection by 20th-century liberal philosopher Judith Shklar. Shklar discusses a handful of ‘ordinary’ human vices – cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, treachery, and misanthropy – in order to assess their political importance. The overarching argument is that in liberal democracies, cruelty ranks first. In her essay on betrayal, she argues that although it has a clear and distinct idea at its core, it is rarely clear-cut enough in practice to play a central role in our moral universe. “Ambiguity may haunt the suffering of the weak sometimes”, she phrases it poetically. In the following paragraphs, I’d like to walk through her discussion of the concept, which moves smoothly from betrayal in social relations to treason in premodern face-to-face politics, up to subversion in modern democracies.
Not creed but character
Already when considering betrayal in social relations, Shklar asks us to consider contextual factors: in an unstable environment, treachery may well become the norm, and though explaining is not excusing, its very ubiquity makes it lose some of its moral sting: “if disloyalty is expected, betrayal must lose its primitive horror.” In such a context, individuals who go beyond normal levels of unreliability can justify their selfishness without having to resort to complete self-deception: “they do live in that kind of world.”
Shklar notes that a sense of betrayal is often attached to discrete decisions involving loyalty conflicts; but that more typically, in human relations, it supervenes upon a situation that is better described simply as change. Couples marry without knowing how future events and character developments will affect their relationship. “Trust is the response to the limits of foresight”, and this trust may be disappointed. Even where the story of a marriage falling apart involves straightforward unfaithfulness from one side, Shklar asks us to see complexity: not a specific isolated act, but a web in which any one act doesn’t “stand out quite as starkly as those who ‘feel betrayed’ think.”
British politician-turned-pundit Rory Stewart recently compared the relation between the US and Europe to an abusive marriage, in which the abuser dares the victim to leave while both know the latter has nowhere to go. Stewart believes that even though – or perhaps, especially since – the abuser is right about their power over us, we need to accept the risk and cost of leaving. If we see where things are headed but stay, we are acquiescing and – now I am paraphrasing Shklar again – our sheer passivity may invite the betrayal which is thereby subtly altered in meaning, away from its simplest case.
If things are ambivalent when the situation is one literal or metaphorical marriage between two individuals, just consider how adding a genuinely political dimension to personal and social commitments complicates the mixture. Shklar quotes with great disdain E.M. Forster’s attempt to cut through these complications, in saying that “if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” She explains that in refusing to take the nature of the state into consideration, “which was, after all, the democratic government of Great Britain”, Forster’s statement was self-important and hollow.
Thinking seriously about the topic of treachery requires thinking seriously about politics, where the most poignant loyalty conflicts take place. These tend to come from us being members of more than two groups, which can turn hostile against each other. Here Shklar makes her observation that the character of the person matters to our judgment: Robert E. Lee’s betrayal of the republic of the United States is generally seen as a heroic tragedy in spite of the thoroughly bad cause he chose to serve, while Cardinal Richelieu’s decision to side with the Protestant League in the Thirty Years War tends to be judged harshly. “It is not creed but character that raises treachery out of its usual depth”, she observes. She suggests cautiously that there is some merit in the ability of a servant of the state to prioritize impersonal over personal loyalties, but it remains possible to her that Richelieu was both a good statesman and a bad person.
Not every age allowed for the same acts of loyalty and betrayal: the separation of personal allegiance and reasons of state did not apply to feudal monarchies. Shklar traces, mainly through Elizabethan theater, the meaning of treason and betrayal at the courts of the Tudors. She observes that in these literary sources, treachery was both meaningful – it had a personal and a political dimension, as well as an ideological or sacral one – and ubiquitous. The courtiers who served princes in this cannibalistic culture could not “yet talk the real language of reason of state”. Only after the monarch rose to a position of absolute power could he “pose […] as the personification of public values, as the ‘servant’ of his state.” This ideology provided calculating acts of personal betrayal with a new respectability and ambivalence: there was honor in putting political necessity above personal ties. Again, Shklar treats this kind of thinking with caution; but she imbues the idea that the ruler and the elites experience a tension between private and public duty with some appeal. It anticipates dilemmas faced by politicians in modern states.
Shklar does not discuss the phenomenon of an administrative state led by a plutocrat cosplaying an absolute monarch while governing like a feudal lord. What she does say about republics – “when there is no personal focus of loyalty” – is that trust and treason pertain to the whole polity, and to one’s fellow citizens. Although this still leaves room for dangerous betrayal, ancient authors writing about republics didn’t treat treason as a profound psychological or moral problem. The desertions and plots of Alcibiades, Coriolanus or Catiline were painted by historians not as absolute transgressions, but as smaller or greater dangers to the state that could be understood and judged through the lens of the character of the person involved.
New complexities arose in modern representative democracies: in ‘Lockean’ free societies trust was essential, but at the same time the suppression of disloyalty became more problematic, as it ran counter to the desired openness and freedom. Like Montesquieu, several Founding Fathers of the United States were aware of the risk that accusations of treason could become partisan or even authoritarian instruments, and the US managed to avoid their overuse. The scarier accusation, according to Shklar, became “subversion – surreptitious designs to destroy the people’s trust in and allegiance to the constitutional system”.
However, as a final major complication, she points out that precisely this dreaded phenomenon of undermining internal divisions, potentially exacerbated by divided loyalties in wartime, is both unavoidable in a pluralistic society, and often hard to pin down as a matter of straightforward betrayal: American Nazis and communists who supported Hitler during WW2 or the Soviet Union during the Cold War were not intentionally betraying the interests of their own country. Naturally, the point is not that their acts and commitments had no moral dimension; the point is that betrayal is not the concept that brings the relevant differences into focus.
Beyond the loser-traitor
Shklar touches upon international relations only in the context of domestic politics – noting that different groups may relate differently to the same war. It seems she would take issue with the idea that when a different group comes to power and dramatically alters the country’s foreign policy priorities, or seeks different alliances, this change itself can best be understood as treachery.
What I was left with after reading Shklar’s essay was agreement with the ways in which she complicates the concept, but also frustration with the extent to which these leave the verdict of betrayal in “ambiguity and doubt”. Can I still use the word in an accusatory manner, or would that make me fall into the trap of “sturdy moralists who prefer to think of betrayal as simple wickedness”?
“It is comforting to argue […] that the Nazis and communists who betrayed Britain and the United States were somehow more twisted psychologically and intellectually than more loyal people in their reference groups. One does not know. However, even if it were true, what set them apart was conviction, ideology, and political passion, not a special mindset that one can label ‘loser-traitor’.”
Is confessing yourself betrayed just adding moralizing semantics to objective injury? That seems too little. A 2021 article on Gulf States relations by Vincent Charles Keating and Lucy M. Abbott tries to assign an appropriate meaning to the notion of betrayal in international relations, by defining it as the breaking of entrusted norms. Entrusted norms are precisely those against the breaking of which actors have not hedged, and which are not monitored or policed by powerful institutions because they are understood to be grounded in preexisting bonds.
Keating and Abbott argue that the breaking of such norms has a special emotional weight and tends to lead to retribution. Especially when open humiliation is involved, repairing relations takes extraordinary effort by the initial transgressor. I would add that this response does not need to be explained in emotional language only, but that it can be a rational form of retaliation that potentially serves to protect actors (collectively) from further descent into a low-trust environment. This is not to downplay the emotional side of the story. As an Atlanticist European, I feel strongly about the material and symbolic harm that the US has inflicted upon us in these long two years: declining to inform its partners about its own offensive war but still demanding their unconditional support; failing to incentivize Russia to cease its threats to European security; largely withdrawing support for Ukraine; and threatening to take territory from a loyal ally by force.
Shklar might have accepted this as a descriptively accurate illustration of events that cause a feeling of betrayal, but still added the thought with which she ends her essay: that in the light of that feeling, “the skeptical intelligence must intervene”. What, actually, are the causes of these abuses? One remains the person of the president, who has demonstrated time and again to be incapable of thinking in terms of ‘reason of state’, judging every outcome instead by how it benefits him personally, and who apparently keeps eyeing opportunities in dealing with Russia that outweigh any classical political considerations. Second, the America First ideology that has always made up a large part of his base, which tends to think of alliances and international commitments as an unnecessary check on America’s ability to be either self-sufficient, or take what it wants without asking. And directly connected to this, a way of thinking of international relations in antidemocratic, imperial terms: not centered around national self-determination and voluntary association, but around spheres of influence and dominance.
These forces are dangerous, but also generally consistent and open about their goals – their representatives are not above telling lies, but they are not exactly hiding their preference for authoritarian politics either. The historical shock is not that they have betrayed their loyalties, but that they have attained durable executive power in the US. One might be tempted to label this a ‘betrayal’ of the democratic world by the American people, but then Shklar’s essay also reminds us that in pluriform societies, placing blame is difficult to begin with.
So what did Shklar’s calm wisdom bring me? Her lessons are not in a more precise definition or stricter policing of a specific moral term – I will not deny myself the right to cry ‘betrayal’ should Elon Musk and Donald Trump conspire (or turn out to have conspired already) to crash Ukrainian drones – but in the reminder that this strong and primary emotion can supervene upon a range of situations with subtly different historical, political and moral layers. Realizing this, while potentially less emotionally satisfying, is intellectually important. It may also be politically important when the time comes to move on. As I suggested above, though Shklar wrote with deep knowledge of the political history of both the US and Europe, she did not cover the future in much detail and generally avoided striking a prophetic tone. However, her essay ends with words that seem to reach to our current moment and beyond:
“the skeptical intelligence must intervene, to restrain despair, to prevent general misanthropy, and above all to stop the destruction of a liberal order that is too determined to avenge itself upon its betrayers.”