I had a moment of insight or perhaps revelation early in this war when the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz first became central in the news and President Trump was publicly debating whether he would use the U.S. Navy to escort ships through it. Would he, won’t he? Will it happen tomorrow? What will he decide. Then I was watching a YouTube show about maritime shipping. In passing the host, Sal Mercogliano, noted that, at that time at least, there weren’t any U.S. naval vessels in the Persian Gulf at all. And the kind of ships you need, in the numbers you’d need, were hundreds of even thousands of miles away. That made perfect sense since for the kind of war the U.S. is currently fighting we don’t need naval vessels anywhere near that close to the combat zone, and when they are that close they become much more vulnerable to attack. But the point is that the whole debate about whether Trump was about to do that any time in the near future was entirely contained within Trump’s Truth Social world. It wasn’t connected to any of the hard realities of whether any of that was even possible.

Our friend John Judis had an essay over the weekend in NOTUS airing the provocative and audacious claim that Trump is a world-historical figure in the way that the German philosopher Hegel used the term. This is a proposition sure to drive many to distraction. And perhaps for good reason. But as I told John in an email I largely agree with him, but with an important exception or difference in the way he articulated the claim. Before getting to that, let me give a very, very brief outline of the concept.

The idea here is not that the figures in question — an Alexander or Caesar or Bonaparte, the figures Hegel thought of — are good people. It’s not even that they necessarily have any articulate awareness of their role in history. It’s that there are some individuals who have an intuitive sense of the opportunities of the historical moment. They then acquire power and force huge changes that drive the course of history in dramatically new directions, directions that are essentially impossible to undo. The key is there’s really no going back from the changes these people make.