Trump’s Imperial Infantilism and Europe’s Failure of Moral Witness: What Arendt Can Teach us About Political (Im)Maturity

The political rhetoric of U.S. President Donald Trump is highly unorthodox and tremendously divisive. His brusque manner, flare for political theater, deliberate ambiguity, and preferred mode of communication (via social media, and increasingly through memes and AI-generated images) is unusual for a head of state. This much is uncontroversial. Critics of Trump’s rhetoric attest to its bullish nature as having a damaging effect on democratic institutions and international law. Supporters argue that it is refreshingly direct, impactful, and that the critics are just overly sentimental.

We argue, however, that there is something meaningful and heuristically valuable being missed in the above types of rhetorical analyses. Such analysis is primarily concerned with the consequences of the rhetoric, or with speculation about the individual psychology from which it emanates. While there is a place for such inquiries, there is arguably a more instructive set of questions for our present political landscape: First, what kind of attitude toward the political sphere does this rhetoric express? And second, what ought we expect from various actors within that political sphere in response to it? For example, when we witness Trump’s rhetoric on Venezuela, Greenland, and now more recently on Iran, it is not merely political aggression and tactical pressure. Rather, it is a specific form of what we call here “imperial infantilism”: the fusion of an immature political psychology characterized by lack of impulse control, short-sightedness, and wounded-ego with the machinery of overwhelming military and economic force.

Trump’s recent comments amid the ongoing conflict with Iran are illustrative of this phenomenon. In April, Trump declared that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”¹ if the Islamic Republic of Iran did not comply with U.S. demands by his deadline, using social media to threaten the country’s infrastructure and further claiming, implausibly, that Iranians themselves would overwhelmingly welcome such use of force.² In what follows, we draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to elucidate the concept of “imperial infantilism” as a plausible hypothesis for how the Trump administration manipulates geopolitical dynamics through its rhetoric. From this, we examine the failings of other actors within the political sphere in response to Trump’s rhetoric—particularly the European nations. This reveals a unique kind of political failure: a failure not only of diplomatic courage, but of moral witness.

Arendt and Political Maturity

A useful starting point for articulating the concept of imperial infantilism is the political thought of Hannah Arendt, and specifically the ideas laid out in The Human Condition (1958).³ There, Arendt conceives of politics not as mere behavior, reaction, or emotional discharge, but as a public realm in which a "plurality" of human beings appear before one another through speech and action. Politics, at its best, involves three features relevant to our present inquiry: first, speech and action among equals; second, responsibility for the shared world; and third, the capacity to appear before others in a way that acknowledges their reality.

By speech and action among equals, Arendt does not mean that political actors are always equal in power, status, or influence. Rather, she means that politics begins when others are treated as participants in a shared world, not merely as obstacles, instruments, or audiences for one’s own self-display. Political speech is therefore not simply expression. It is a mode of appearing before others and addressing them as beings whose presence and judgment matter. Responsibility for the shared world follows from this. Politics is not only the pursuit of private desire by public means; it is the difficult work of sustaining a common space in which different people can appear, disagree, act, and be heard. Finally, practicing politics requires the discipline and capacity to restrain the impulse to collapse politics into private appetite, personal grievance, or theatrical self-assertion. To act politically, in this Arendtian sense, is to accept that one’s will is not the measure of the world.

A system of human interaction in which these qualities obtain to a high degree achieves political maturity. A system in which they do not, that instead champions an individualist escapism from civic responsibility and from the adjudication of competing civil interests among equals within a common enterprise, amounts to a system of political immaturity.⁴ While there are a variety of forms that political immaturity may take,⁵ one particularly stark form that is pertinent to our present context is the rejection of civic responsibility and of law’s claim to limit political will. This happens when legal and institutional constraints are viewed as intolerable impediments to desired ends. This feeling of constraint produces a mix of frustration and resentment toward regulative institutions. Maturity, in both ethics and politics, involves the capacity to live with limits, including the limit that other people are not extensions of one’s will; the limit that reality does not bend to one’s appetite; and the limit that the exercise of power must be constrained by law, proportionality, and self-restraint. The ethically and politically immature person, by contrast, experiences such limits as intolerable, refusing constraint unless it can be converted into grievance, insult, or rage. Here, the language of infantilism⁶ is useful not because it makes a claim about children as such but because it names a recognizably immature pattern of conduct, where frustration is not mediated by reflection, public reason, or institutional constraint, but discharged as demand, resentment, or threat. The mature person recognizes limits as the precondition of a shared world (in the Arendtian sense), and potentially of a more free world.⁷ The politically immature person is incapable of recognizing the limits of law as necessary features of civic life. We deem this “political infantilism.”⁸

One way to understand political infantilism is through the psychoanalytic idea of “regression.”⁹ In psychoanalytic theory, from Freud onwards, regression names a movement back toward earlier patterns of response when the self is confronted by anxiety, frustration, or constraint; later work on defense mechanisms also treats regression as one of the immature ways in which adults may manage stress or threat. The politically infantile actor cannot tolerate limits, experiencing resistance as insult, complexity as weakness, and restraint as humiliation. They do not answer frustration with argument or judgment but with threat, exaggeration, and theatrical overreaction. In ordinary life, we call this a tantrum. In politics, it becomes something far more dangerous: an expression of contempt for the mechanisms of domestic and international law that aim to regulate forms of political prejudice antithetical to maintaining the fabric of a civil society constituted by free and equal persons.

Political infantilism is, thus, in serious tension with Arendt’s plausible, normative notion of politics and of political maturity. Where the political infant has outbursts of rage when procedure limits their goals, they neither demonstrate that they consider themselves to be acting among political equals with whom they carry a responsibility for a shared world, nor express a discipline that signals recognition of the other as having political significance. In this sense, political infantilism is not merely a defect of temperament but a failure of political relations. It refuses the basic Arendtian condition of politics: that we inhabit a world with others who cannot simply be wished away, threatened into silence, or reduced to instruments of our personal wills.

A feature of this view worth noting is that the political sphere is not a given, but something achieved and fragile. It thus requires a reciprocity of sorts. Political actors within it—which at the international level essentially means nation-states, and perhaps institutions such as the UN, the EU, and others—must work to uphold international laws and norms, the absence of which creates chaos. These norms are fragile achievements, and when they are treated as optional, the shared political world begins to give way to disorder and impunity. When political infantilism raises its head, our institutions must do more than manage its consequences; they must work to counteract it and restore balance. The relevance of this issue to us now will be addressed shortly. But first, there is something far more dangerous than mere political infantilism: when it is joined to overwhelming military, economic and geopolitical power. At that point, it becomes imperial infantilism.

Imperial Infantilism Disguised as Realism: Trump’s Rhetoric

A tantrum is never merely private when it belongs to someone with political authority. Even at the domestic level, politically immature conduct can be dangerous for those subject to it. But when it is backed by military supremacy, global reach, and a culture of impunity, it mutates into a reckless style of power. What appears at the level of conduct as an inability to tolerate limits appears politically as threats, humiliations, and the heedless treatment of whole peoples as objects on which power can perform itself. We can call this state of affairs “imperial infantilism”: a perilous fusion of immature political conduct with the machinery of overwhelming force.¹⁰ Imperial infantilism, then, is a specific form of political infantilism in which the immature refusal to accept limits is no longer merely a defect of political conduct, nor even only a danger to a given domestic population, but becomes joined to overwhelming military, economic, and geopolitical power. What might otherwise remain a domestic mode of domination, already dangerous to those subject to it, becomes geopolitical when directed at less powerful states and vulnerable populations.

Recall that for Arendt, politics at its best involves speech and action among equals, responsibility for that shared world, and the discipline of appearing before others in a way that acknowledges their reality. Trump’s rhetoric paradigmatically flouts this standard: it does the opposite. It collapses politics into reaction, turning public speech into the emotional discharge of one man’s wounded will. The danger is that this will is not merely private. That same will also commands the most powerful military and economy in the world.

Trump’s recent language on Iran illustrates this point sharply. When he threatens on social media to eradicate Iran’s infrastructure,¹¹ for example, this is not the language of a statesman wrestling with tragedy. It is the language of someone who cannot bear frustration without escalating it into theater. Nor is Iran an exception. The same pattern appears whenever Trump encounters resistance, criticism, or limits. When Pope Leo condemned¹² the war and described Trump’s threat against Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable,” Trump responded not with argument but with insult, calling the pope “terrible for foreign policy” and telling him to “get his act together,” before posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus.¹³ This is not eccentricity but the conversion of rebuke into performance, whereby under pressure, judgment gives way to inflated grievance-sharing that others are commanded to acknowledge.

The chief symptom of political infantilism—experiencing limits as intolerable—as characteristic of Trump’s political reality is something that he effectively states himself. In a January interview with The New York Times, he said, “I don’t need international law,” and claimed that the only real limit on his power was “my own morality, my own reason.”¹⁴ The political significance of that remark is hard to miss. It places personal will where public restraint should be. What should limit power from outside is brought back inside the ego, not as sovereign seriousness, but as a regression to the fantasy that one’s own will is measure enough. This is why Trump’s rhetoric repeatedly takes the opposite form of political maturity. It transforms disagreement into defiance, defiance into insult, and insult into justification for menace. In one recent episode, he used a profanity-laced outburst through which he tried to “recast” an unpopular war in heroic, cinematic terms.¹⁵ That is exactly what tantrum politics does: turn the world into a stage on which an injured ego can perform its revenge. What should be processed through judgment is discharged instead through a political circus.¹⁶

This is why designating Trump as a “strongman”¹⁷ misses the point. The strongman type still contains a residue of discipline, calculation, and self-command. But Trump’s public style often reflects something more primitive, namely impulsiveness elevated into doctrine. He does not master force; he personalizes it. He does not submit emotion to judgment; he turns emotion¹⁸ into public policy. The issue is not that politics can or should be free of emotion. Political emotions shape judgment, solidarity, and collective action. The danger arises when personal grievance is no longer mediated by judgment or institutions, but becomes itself a style of rule. The result is not strength, but weaponized immaturity, an imperial form of political infantilism in which emotional regression and emotional outbursts acquire global consequences because they speak through the machinery of empire.

This unruly set of impulses is formalized through the state apparatus and gets sold to the public at home and abroad under the thin veneer of hard-nosed realism. The Trump administration as a whole has styled its foreign policy in the image of realpolitik. After years of allegedly being economically taken advantage of by other states and organizations (such as NATO and the EU) as a result of weak U.S. leadership, the current White House no longer speaks in the moralistic language of leading the free world and of the emancipation of oppressed peoples. Instead, it explicitly speaks in terms of power and self-interest: American concerns come first, and they will be enforced militarily where necessary. The administration’s chief theoretical tactician and political advisor Stephen Miller echoed Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes when he claimed,¹⁹ with reference to the U.S. stance on Greenland and Venezuela, that we live in “the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” An attitude of this kind is no less pervasive, though in a more explicitly military register, in the press conferences given by the “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, in the ongoing Operation “Epic Fury” against Iran. This purported realism attempts to present Trump’s foreign policy as hard-headed, pragmatic, and strategically sober: willing to bypass democratic and moral norms in times of alleged socio-economic or political crisis, and to project uncompromising force where necessary.

This is not realism in any serious sense. Realism, at least in its more disciplined forms, prizes prudence, strategic patience, emotional control, and a clear grasp of consequences. Trump’s conduct displays none of these virtues. Moreover, any serious realist thinker in the history of that tradition understands the instrumental value of maintaining at least a veneer of rule-based governance, in which moral language and legal norms remain politically useful. Even an entity as brutal²⁰ and self-serving²¹ as the Islamic Republic’s present regime couches their own geopolitical muscle-flexing and expansionism in the language of stable peace and respect for international law.²² This long-term prudence is noticeably absent in the U.S. president’s oratory.

It is therefore a mistake to dismiss concern over Trump’s rhetoric as overblown, and to tolerate or even affirm it as simply a quirk of character that has no bearing on his ability to steer the national course in a competent way. Trump’s defenders call his style bluntness. But bluntness names honesty without ornament, whereas this is something else altogether: It is regression with an army behind it. The problem, then, is not simply bad manners or offensive tone, but as Arendt helps us to see, it is a failure of political maturity. The potential catastrophic results of pervasive political infantilism entrenched within military supremacy require little imagination. Arguably, this is one of the warnings Thucydides invites²³ us to heed concerning the fate of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. Power might rule in the political domain, but so brazenly and openly abandoning moral rhetoric in favor of rule-by-force can be internally fatal when pushed to its limits by incompetent and overconfident actors.

Europe’s Failure as Moral Witness

This brings us to Europe and to lessons for other leaders and other states when confronting imperial infantilism. There will always be forms of political and imperial infantilism—the ebb and flow of domestic politics periodically gives rise to brazen figures that market themselves as challenges to the established order, even the moral and political order of the global community. But this should rejuvenate concern for the precious achievement of international standards of conduct, and where experienced and powerful nation states must exercise their responsibility to rein in, or at least meaningfully challenge, the politically infantile.

Standing up to imperial infantilism is precisely where Europe has recently failed in Arendtian terms. The European failure is not simply diplomatic weakness, but the failure of the adults in the room. Some European governments have indeed resisted the war with Iran and responded with more than quiet caution. Spain strongly condemned the attacks and refused to allow U.S. forces to use Spanish bases for military operations against Iran. France adopted a more legally critical stance, warning that military action outside international law risks undermining global stability, while still avoiding confrontation with Washington. Italy also raised legal concerns, with its defense minister describing the strikes as inconsistent with international law. Britain, by contrast, has tried to maintain a more balanced transatlantic posture, combining calls for de-escalation with defensive support in the region. These distinctions matter. Europe’s response has not been uniformly weak or passive. But the broader pattern remains disjointed, cautious, and strategically constrained.²⁴ Moral and pragmatic failure can coexist with partial resistance. One can limit participation in a war while still failing to articulate the deeper wrong. Too many European leaders still speak as short-sighted risk managers rather than moral witnesses. They discuss escalation, alliance strain, shipping routes, NATO cohesion, and energy security. All of that is real and not trivial concerns, but they are not enough. When leaders such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz frame the moment as one in which Europeans should not “lecture” their allies,²⁵ or when Britain speaks mainly in the language of defensive support and de-escalation, the deeper moral judgment is muted. Mark Carney’s warning that democratic allies should not put a “sign in the window” for Trump is relevant here, because allies should not advertise their willingness to accommodate a politics of intimidation.²⁶ When a U.S. president publicly threatens civilian infrastructure and speaks about mass death in the tone of personal swagger, the first obligation of democratic leaders should be to say plainly that this is indecent, unlawful in spirit, and politically degrading.

It matters that imperial infantilism is publicly confronted in this way by the appropriate political powers because rhetoric is never only rhetoric. Public language trains public sensibility and does not merely describe political possibilities. It widens or narrows the threshold of what can be threatened, justified, and eventually done. When a president threatens millions in the idiom of a social media post, they are teaching more than policy. They are teaching that force need not justify itself, only dramatize itself. They are teaching that humiliation is a political resource. They are teaching that if one is powerful enough, immaturity can masquerade as authenticity and cruelty as candor.

Arendt distinguished politics from mere administration, and that distinction is relevant here. Where such language is met mainly with strategic caution, something disastrous happens, and the tantrum is normalized by being absorbed into ordinary diplomacy. What should be judged politically is managed bureaucratically. This is the more profound philosophical scandal. Trump is not only dangerous because he threatens Iranian civilians. He is dangerous because he lowers the moral age of politics itself. He invites the world to organize itself around the emotional weather of a man who experiences frustration as humiliation and humiliation as a warrant for menace. And when other leaders fail to rebuke this with moral clarity, they help teach the next generation a poisonous lesson: that raw power excuses immaturity, that law bends before ego, and that those who can threaten most loudly are entitled to set the tone of the world. To name that lesson in imperial terms is not to indulge a slogan, a red herring, or a geopolitical aesthetic. Anti-imperial language can indeed be abused.²⁷ But that is all the more reason to use it carefully when overwhelming power treats other peoples as disposable objects of threat and coercion.

That lesson is devastating. It tells young citizens that politics is not the difficult art of judgment among equals, but a theater in which the least mature actor, if armed strongly enough, can dominate everyone else. It tells them that adulthood in public life does not consist in restraint, proportion, and responsibility, but in the successful performance of grievance. It tells them, finally, that might makes right not because the principle is true, but because too few people with power are willing to say that it might be false.

Power may indeed, and may always, govern the political landscape behind moral rhetoric. But what Thucydides so vividly warned us against is the danger of entrusting excessive power to those incapable of responsibly wielding it. This is what we see today in the United States. Even the powerful have historically benefited from at least the guise of a rule-governed international order, since that appearance gives their power legitimacy and diplomatic cover. The danger of Trump’s imperial infantilism is that it weakens even this appearance, replacing the language of order with the open performance of force. Europe should be ashamed that it has so often responded to the Trump administration’s imperial escapades not with the moral language such a spectacle deserves and can be combatted with if enough states present a unified front, but with the bureaucratic and feeble vocabulary of economic damage limitation. This inadvertently sanctions the very collapse of the pretense of international order that the aspiring-realist Trump administration invites. The problem with a tantrum lies not only with the child who throws it but also with the adults who indulge its capricious desires.

—Hossein Dabbagh and Patrick Hassan

Hossein Dabbagh is an assistant professor of philosophy at Northeastern University London, and a member of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. His work focuses on practical ethics and political philosophy.

Patrick Hassan is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University. He specializes in 19th century European philosophy and ethics. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy (Routledge, 2021)

NOTES