Por Stephen F. Eisenman
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Albrecht Dürer, Nemesis (The Great Fortune), 1501–2. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. |
Among the pleasures of writing a regular column for CounterPunch is the chance to revisit subjects treated earlier. I don’t do it often – there’s always new issues to discuss – but in the present historical circumstances, a reconsideration feels necessary.
On June 7, in a column titled The Reality of Defeat, I described the war against Iran as an exercise in vengeance. Following the successful kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, Trump saw an opportunity to do the same or something similar in Iran. With the cooperation of Israel – possibly at their instigation – the president determined not to kidnap, but to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with much of his extended family. In the hours and days that followed, Israel and the U.S. also assassinated around 50 more generals, defense leaders, and other high-ranking officials, so many that President Trump admitted he couldn’t find anybody left to attend the expected surrender ceremony.
The strategic purpose of the assassinations and other violence inflicted upon Iran – including the bombing of the Minab Elementary School that killed some 120 children and 35 teachers and the recent killing of 66 people at a wedding party – remains unclear. Iran was no threat to the U.S. and never was. Its military proved ineffective in an extended war with Iraq (1980-88) and little has changed since. If anything, the growing, popular illegitimacy of the Iranian regime has weakened its ability to recruit and motivate its military forces. Iran’s nuclear program, quiescent after the informal treaty forged with President Obama, was activated after Trump’s abrogation of the agreement in 2017. But the joint U.S.- Israeli bombardment of Iran’s nuclear bases during the June war of 2025 set back any progress the country made in developing a nuclear weapon.
Thus, I concluded in June, the only explanation for Trump’s reckless actions in Iran is revenge – not for any recent injury to him – but for what he took to be the humiliation of the U.S. government and citizens, himself included, during and after the 1979 hostage crisis. That’s when a group of Iranian students, in retaliation for U.S. support for the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, held hostage 66 Americans, later reduced to 52 — including diplomats and other civilian personnel — at the American Embassy in Tehran. They were demanding the extradition of the disgraced Shah so he could stand trial for crimes committed during his long dictatorship (1941-79). The ultimatum was of course refused – no modern imperial power allows itself to be commanded by a weaker, peripheral state. What is capitalist hegemony for if not to enjoy freedom of expropriation, exploitation, and the monopolization of violence?
The crisis ended immediately following the January 21, 1981, swearing-in of new president Ronald Reagan. There was discussion at the time that a deal must have been struck between Reagan’s campaign and the Iranian political leadership to retain the hostages until after the election, the better to weaken Carter and assure Republican triumph. Subsequent information – including the so-called “Ben Barnes revelations” — has proven the theory correct. Reagan promised the Iranians a better deal than Carter’s if they agreed to hold the hostages until after he took office.
Notwithstanding Reagan and his team’s duplicity, Trump like many others – Republican, Democrat, conservative and liberal – considered the Iranian Revolution and consequent hostage episode a humiliation. American power – including control of global oil prices — was thwarted by a bunch of mullahs and a motley group of Islamic students. In 1980, Trump, an ambitious 34-year-old real estate entrepreneur, was interviewed by the T.V. gossip columnist Rona Barrett and criticized President Carter for his failure to militarily intervene in Iran. He called the hostage taking “absolutely and totally ridiculous…a horror” as well as an affront that no other country would tolerate. Forty years later, after ordering the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani, President Trump (an ascension even the fabulist gossip reporter never imagined) vowed to bomb 52 Iranian sites – one for every hostage held 40 years earlier – if the country dared retaliate.
Trump has frequently repeated variations of the cliché “revenge is a dish best served cold,” though his entrees are at least warm. Vendettas include those against New York Attorney General Letitia James, Special Counsel Jack Smith, and of course, former FBI Director James Comey. There have been dozens, probably hundreds more; millions if you include the collateral damage: urban residents hurt by budget cuts to Democratic cities; students injured by attacks on universities; rural and indigenous people sickened by pollution from mining, drilling, and unchecked air and water pollution. Indeed, it could be argued, as Jamelle Bouie and I have, that Trump’s very raison d’etre is to exact retribution against individuals, institutions and indeed the whole world for slights and injuries experienced over a lifetime.
To Trump’s great frustration, he has largely been denied the vengeance he sought in Iran. Heedless of warnings that the country could retaliate against American allies in the region – many of which host U.S. military bases – as well as halt the flow of oil and other products through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump attacked anyway. By the time open hostilities ceased in July 2026 (temporarily, as it turned out), it was clear that Trump had lost the contest. All his war aims, confused and shifting as they were, were unfulfilled: the regime was intact and, in some ways, strengthened; Iran retained most of its ballistic missiles; its nuclear capabilities were unchanged; and the country now had gained the ability to choke trade through the vital strait of Hormuz.
In addition, the U.S. military found itself on the back foot globally, lacking enough ballistic and Patriot missiles to effectively attack and defend itself in case of war elsewhere, not to mention in the Middle East itself. The peace deal with Iran signed by Trump in the Palace of Versailles – where the Entente powers led by Germany surrendered in 1918 – was thus nothing less than a capitulation, and it has been understood that way by much of the press, political classes, and public around the world. Trump was humiliated and the global, capitalist order shaken.
Now that shooting has resumed, albeit at a reduced level, Trump is enacting the popular definition of insanity: doing the same thing over again but expecting different results. Reports indicate that if anything, Iran is better prepared for a lengthy war now and more confident about a favorable outcome than it was six months ago when the U.S. and Israel first attacked. If Trump expects to see Iran at a surrender ceremony, he will have a long wait. A more likely scenario is a second Trump defeat. French President Macron may already be making reservations at Versailles.
All of which poses the historical and psychological question: Why would a president, or any ruler take so disastrous a path that he would lose a war not once, but twice? And what are the consequences of such a fate? It turns out that the heads of large states and empires frequently suffer from a sort of repetition compulsion: a tendency to revisit political and military humiliations in the certainty that the initial defeat was an aberration that could never recur. One theorist, David Ronfeldt, a former RAND Corporation security analyst called it the “hubris-nemesis complex”: the habit of arrogant rulers to identify arch enemies, the better to inflate their own egos by defeating them; then, if thwarted, lashing out repeatedly in anger and frustration.
The pattern may be discerned as early as the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I around the year 1500, at the very start of the period of European enclosure, conquest, and “primitive accumulation” antecedent to the emergence of capitalism. Indeed, it was only when Maximilian managed to master his own “hubris-nemesis complex” that his empire gained the security and geographic extent it did. Trump, scion of a collapsing empire, would do well to learn Maximilian’s lesson, though that prospect is unlikely.
Albrecht Dürer’s Nemesis
In the late 1490s, Maximilian I, king of the Habsburg dynasty and de facto Holy Roman Emperor, sought to further consolidate power both by acquiring territory on the periphery of his holdings and suppressing nations that exercised autonomy. One of the latter was the nascent Swiss Confederacy, which refused to pay taxes to the emperor, accept imperial laws, or contribute soldiers to Maximilian’s armies. The resulting Swabian War (1499) ended with the defeat of the emperor, his forced acceptance of the Treaty of Basel, and the definitive establishment of a fully independent Swiss Confederacy, precisely the opposite of his war aims.
Just a year later, in 1500, Maximilian lent support to his cousins King John (Hans) of Denmark and Duke Frederick of Holstein, in a war to conquer Dithmarschen, an independent, peasant republic on the Western coast of the North Sea, in present-day Germany. The land, much of it fertile marshes converted to grazing, had long been coveted by the Holstein Duchy, and Maximilian was eager to help them claim it for the empire. And there was another goal too: to teach a lesson. If peasants there could successfully refuse seigneurial rights and the authority of the emperor, what was to stop peasants elsewhere from doing the same? There was already a growing peasant class-consciousness, and increasing demands to restore the commons (the right to graze, glean, hunt, and collect wood and water) manifested in 1476 by the revolt led by Hans Boeheim of Niklashausen, better known as Hans the Piper. “There should be,” he said:
“neither king nor princes, neither pope nor other ecclesiastic or lay authority. Every one should be a brother to each other and win his bread by the toil of his hands, possessing no more than his neighbor. All taxes, ground rents, serf duties, tolls and other payments and deliveries should be abolished forever. Forests, waters and meadows should be free everywhere.” [Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany,” (Chapter Three), 1850.]
That revolt was successfully repressed, but Maximillian was wary of others. He therefore supported the joint Danish-Holstein invasion of Dithmarschen and agreed to the deployment of his notorious “Great Guard” (Magna Guardia), 4,000 highly lethal German Landsknecht mercenaries. Joining them in the fight were about 5,000 commoners, 2,000 cavaliers, and a thousand artillerymen. Facing them were 6,000 peasants.
After a rapid advance, the invading forces were stopped by barricades on a narrow road surrounded by marshes. While armed peasants held the Landsknecht and allied troops at bay, others opened sluice gates to flood the fields. When the peasants retreated, the troops – stymied by the barricades – were forced into the flooded terrain. Some of them managed to retreat, but many more drowned, weighted down by their heavy armor. About half the ducal army died in the Battle of Hemmingstedt and the peasant republic survived.
The example of Dithmarschen was a factor in the contemporaneous Bundschuh (“Union Boot”) movement, the “Poor Conrad” rebellion (1514) of Swabian peasants, the German Peasant War (1524-25), and subsequent revolts in England, France, and elsewhere.
[Note: The Dithmarschen peasants’ military strategy may have been inspiration for the scene of the battle on the ice and the drowned German army in Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Alexander Nevsky (1938). The incident in the film was not based on any accounts of the historical 1242 Battle of Lake Peipus. The filmmaker, polymathic and fluent in German, may have read some of the historical accounts of the Battle of Hemmingstedt that began to appear following the 400th anniversary of the battle in 1900, or the popular novel on the subject by the völkisch literary critic and writer Adolf Bartels, Die Dithmarscher: Historischer Roman in vier Büchern from 1898 (republished in subsequent decades). The battle was also depicted in a large mural by the German artist Max Friedrich Koch in 1910 and in woodcuts by Hans Grohs from his Dithmarschen Geschichte series. In addition, Eisenstein would have known Friedrich Engels mention of Dithmarschen in chapter 9 of his book The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)].
Maximilian’s failed efforts to destroy two popular, well-defended republics in successive years were an example of imperial overreach and the hubris-nemesis complex. The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer may have been referring to the twin defeats in the great engraving he titled Nemesis from 1501-2 (illustrated at the top of this column).
The conventional interpretation of the print – correct as far as it goes – is that the female figure, inspired by the Latin poem Manto by Italian scholar Angelo Poliziano – is a hybrid of the Greek goddess of retribution Némesis (Νέμεσις) and the Roman goddess of luck, Fortuna. Dürer knew the poem, printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1498, through his best friend, the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer. The relevant lines from the poem are as follows:
There is a goddess suspended high upon the vacant air who makes her way girded by a cloud, but her mantle is of brilliant white, her hair radiant, and her whirring wings produce a shrill sound. She suppresses immoderate hopes and fiercely menaces the proud; it was given to her to crush the haughty minds of men and to rout their successes and their ambitious projects. The ancients called her Nemesis, born of the silent night to Ocean, her father. Stars adorn her brow; in her hand she holds the bridle and the libation bowl; she ceases not to utter a fearsome laugh and stands opposed to senseless undertakings, quelling evil desires. And turning everything topsy-turvy, she confounds and orders our actions by turns and is borne hither and thither by the force of the whirlwind. [Angelo Poliziano, Silvae, ed. and trans. by Charles Fantazzi (Cambridge, Mass.: I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 7.]
Dürer took obvious liberties with the passage. The goddess stands not in “vacant air” but unsteadily upon a globe that represents both the earth and the precariousness of any venture born of pride, folly or hubris. Below her is an alpine landscape, identified as a view of Klausen in the southern Tyrol. The “libation bowl” more resembles a goblet, the attribute of Fortuna, and is lidded because it contains the fates – punishments and rewards – that must remain carefully bottled until needed. And of course, Dürer’s goddess, unlike Poliziano’s, is decidedly plebeian, even matronly. Nemesis it appears, is the people’s avenging angel, not the gods’.
Less recognized by Dürer scholars and others is the significance of the next section of Poliziano’s poem. It warns that political and military pride comes before a fall, using the example of ancient Greece:
[The Goddess] saw you, Greece, swollen with pride after your defeat of the Persians, carrying your victorious standards to the lands of the East. She saw you, too, proud of your Aonian song and of your eloquence, exalted and grandiloquent, lifting your head to touch the skies, and thinking you were not less than the gods. Then, detesting your excessive pride, she forced you to bear the yoke upon your neck and subjected you in inglorious defeat to the might of Latin arms.
Conrad Celtis, Quatuor Libri Amorum, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1502.
The poet’s discussion of “Greece, swollen with pride…subjected to inglorious defeat” would have seemed to Dürer a description of Maximillian. Beginning in the 1490s, he claimed lineage from Hector of Troy, among other ancient Greek heroes, and hired a team of ideologists to try to prove it. Among them were Ladislaus Sunthaym, Johannes Trithemius, and Conrad Celtis. The last was the imperial Poet Laureate with whom Dürer was collaborating at precisely the time he was working on Nemesis. The artist produced a title page woodcut for Celtis’ contemporaneous book, Quatuor Libri Amorum (Four Books of Love), which shows the author on his knees before the enthroned Maximillian. Surrounded by grapes, acanthus leaves and putti, the latter is the inheritor of Greco-Roman wisdom and sovereignty. The Latin legend at the bottom reads: “He who curses his prince shall surely be put to death. Exodus 21,” indicating the prideful wrath of powerful kings. The actual passage from Exodus, which derives from Mosaic law, reads: “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.” Exodus 21: 17.
Born and living in the city of Nuremberg, then the administrative center of the Holy Roman Empire, Dürer must have heard all about the Treaty of Basel and the defeat at Dithmarschen. The former was signed in the city in which the young artist resided (1491-94) while developing his skills as a woodcut artist, illustrating for example, Sebastian Brant’s satirical Ship of Fools (1494). In late 1494, Dürer departed Nuremberg again, this time for Italy, stopping, however, in Klausen in the South Tyrol. Even then it was renowned for its beauty, and eight years later, Dürer used it as the landscape setting for Nemesis. Was he highlighting by contrast, the blessings of peace and military restraint so recently disturbed by Maximilian in Switzerland and Dithmarschen? His engraving of Nemesis should be considered a satire, albeit a learned one, that masks with classical allusion criticism of Maximilian’s hubris.
A decade later, Dürer would go to work for the emperor and become one of his chief propagandists, producing the monumental, 36-sheet woodcut Arch of Honor (1517). But his sympathies probably remained with the peasants. In 1525, he created, as part of his Treatise on Measurement, a design for a monument commemorating the defeated peasants of 1525. There’s little scholarly consensus about the meaning of the design – whether it honors or condemns the peasants or their leader, Thomas Munzer, who called for “all things to be held in common and distributed … to each according to his need.” But it’s at least clear that Dürer intended the monument to bring attention to the peasants’ own world. The column is composed of stacked-up farm animals, eggs, cheese, kegs of butter, jugs of milk, hoes, pitchforks, flails and a chicken coop. At the very top is a slumped peasant, killed by a sword through the back. The demotic ethos of the image seems far removed from that of Dürer’s new employer, Emperor Charles V whose hubris exceeded even that of his grandfather, Maximilian. He dreamed of a Monarchia Universalia, a global Christian empire under his military control. During the remaining three years of Dürer’s life, he received no commissions from Charles, nor did the emperor or any of his family purchase works by him.
Albrecht Durer, Monument to the Suppression of the Peasants’ Rebellion (recto) 1525. The verso showing the intended the base is just visible through the paper.
Trump and the hubris-nemesis complex
As the average price of a gallon of diesel fuel approaches six dollars and regular gas five, a second Trump surrender is only a matter of time. But even that may not be enough to prevent further acts of vengeance directed toward Iran, or another perceived enemy: Cuba, Canada, Greenland, Spain, Mexico, Ukraine or even the E.U. The president appears gripped by the “hubris-nemesis complex.” In his 1986 L.A. Times op-ed on the topic, and then in his 1994 white paper written for RAND and the CIA Office of Research and Development, David Ronfeldt developed a psychological profile of “decision-making by leaders in states that may be obtaining or using weapons of mass destruction.” He claimed to find in these men a tendency to hubris (also described by him as “malignant narcissism”) accompanied by a commitment, as he wrote: “to being the nemesis of the United States; for these men, America is the epitome of hubris, and hence the chosen enemy.”
The Cold-War context of Ronfeldt’s theorizing limited its usefulness. His patrons (RAND and the CIA) were unlikely to accept the possibility that Fidel Castro, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Moammar Kadafi (Ronfeldt’s chief exemplars) had good reason to mistrust or even revile the U.S. and consider the American president their nemesis. But even his first iteration of the theory in 1986 contained the seeds of an eventual about face. Those gripped by the hubris-nemesis complex:
demand absolute loyalty and constant attention–the bigger the audience, the better. They cannot tolerate being ignored or upstaged. They compete with even ‘friendly’ rivals more than they cooperate. They write their own rules and hate to play by anybody else’s. They regard compromise and accommodation as weakness. They refuse to be humbled by their allies or enemies (though they feign humility to selected audiences).
By 2017, Ronfeldt had explicitly shifted attention from supposed U.S. adversaries to the new occupant of the oval office. Two days after Trump’s inauguration, he published the following blog post:
It looks like he [Trump] has a “hubris-nemesis complex” — a rare mentality whereby a leader not only has hubris (the pretension to be God-like) but also wants to play Nemesis (the goddess of divine vengeance) against another actor who is accused of greater hubris.
Ronfeldt concluded:
This combination may make our society even more vulnerable to corruption and cronyism, and to stepped-up efforts at surveillance and censorship. A kind of information-age fascism seems increasingly likely, as I’ve long worried (even as I know that word “fascism” may not be quite accurate). His psyche seems more conducive to patrimonial corporatism than to liberal democracy.
A few days later, he added:
In such leaders, the complex means more than exhibiting hubris and nemesis as separate qualities. The integration of the two forces and their interaction appears to result in something more complex, more pathological, than the description of either force alone may imply at first glance. For, to be as powerful as their hubris requires, such leaders must act as the nemesis of an outside power; indeed, it is part of their hubris to be a nemesis. At the same time, to fulfill the nemesis role against such a power, they yearn for expanded, if not absolute, power for themselves at home and abroad — they want the capability to impose their hubris.
I reached out to Ronfeldt this week (we’d never met or communicated) to see if his views had changed in the decade since he published his first reading of Trump. He quickly replied: “Yes to Trump having full-blown hubris-nemesis complex.” And then followed up: “Trump is what we used to think could never happen in and to America.” I thanked David for his views and links to some of his publications and told him he’d soon become famous among CounterPunch readers!
But here’s the rub with this and any categorizing, psychologizing, and pathologizing of Trump — my own included. The man is an avatar of a faltering global power, and any president – regardless of party — intent on restoring economic and ideological (not just military) hegemony will act in a similar manner. Clinton, the Bushes, Obama and Biden all sought to isolate and punish regimes that failed to follow “the rule-based order” determined by the U.S. and its allies. That ordered system mandated a dollar-denominated global exchange, free trade in goods but not people, government price supports for selected industries (for me but not for thee), and nuclear defense only for those few already in the club.
Those five presidents deported immigrants and denied refuge to needy asylum seekers to placate racist Americans deranged by neo-liberal austerity programs. They practiced military Keynesianism, offering huge contracts and tax breaks to corporations producing unnecessary (and often non-functioning) weapons systems, aircraft and battleships, while starving investment in education, healthcare, housing and infrastructure. They waged war – both open and clandestinely – and legitimized assassination as an instrument of statecraft. They helped establish the U.S. as the world’s largest penal state and pioneered the use of computer technology to spy on citizens. They disappeared and tortured people suspected but never criminally charged or convicted of terrorism. Finally, they failed to shift the country from fossil to renewable fuels, dooming the U.S. and the globe to an uncomfortable if not unlivable future.
Trump’s “sociopathy,” “hubris-nemesis complex,” “pathological narcissism,” or simply dementia – has made everything worse, faster. He’s at least a “patrimonial corporatist” if not a fascist, and I’m enough of a liberal to think that the “not so good” previous presidents are still better than the “a lot worse” current one. Show me the lesser of two evils and I’ll vote for it. But until the country decisively shakes off its addiction to hegemony, it’s likely to continue to receive what it has from former U.S. governments, Trumpian and otherwise: recession, inflation, corruption, racism, inequality, pollution and war. We are our own nemesis.
Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of a dozen books, the latest of which (with Sue Coe), is titled “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,” (OR Books, 2014). He is also co-founder of Anthropocene Alliance. Stephen welcomes comments and replies at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu
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