In Greek mythology, Chaos is that primordial state which precedes the appearance of the Gods. A gaping void, a primordial non-time prior to the blossoming of light — which is necessary for the appearance of life. To evoke the origin of the gods, one must refer to Chaos (as Hesiod’s Theogony does, 8th century BC). Chaos precedes Gaia (the Earth) and the principal elements, the Sky, Darkness, Night, Day, Light… It is formless, inert mass, perhaps an abyss.

 In Carl Schmitt’s political theology, the modern government of the living profanely transposes this origin story. The Hobbesian state of nature is the Greek Chaos; the Sovereign is the heir to the gods who prevents a relapse into civil war. Government (rather than reign) consists first and foremost in the production of an order that is always singular in form, but whose premise is the revocation of chaos. In modern societies, Foucault’s disciplines and rationalities order forms of life. Chaos remains that which perpetually threatens to resurface if government fails, revealing a structural pact between knowledge and the stakes of power

To produce order, the state requires a monopoly of violence, yet violence is inherently inhabited by disorder, danger, and death. Machiavelli highlights this paradox: establishing a lasting order requires a calculated disorder destined to produce effects of stupefaction or paralysis on the populace. Similarly, imperial expansion transits through the paroxystic disorder of war to achieve a more favorable peace—peace being the ultimate figure of order. A secret complicity thus connects order to disorder, with the latter acting as a calculated by-product, euphemism, or partial reprisal of the original chaos

Armed violence operates as a temporary exception oriented toward a new structural order. For example, the horrific planning of the Final Solution was executed by the Nazi’s as obsessive operations of ordering and purification, relying on a minutely ordered instrumental rationality. Every conqueror— from Napoleon to classical European and US imperialism—has used temporary, calculated disorder as a strategy to establish a new long-term order.

Trump signals a radical rupture: the dialectical thread linking violent disruptions to strategic geopolitical objectives is broken. The offensive led by the Trump gang operates as a politico-historical UFO. It is woven from continuous acting-out, personal whims, and improvised fits of temper rather than rational calculations of interest. US foreign policy now resembles blind shadowboxing in a dark ring. When the disproportion between a mafia-like famiglia’scapacity to unleash hell and the imprecision of its actual intentions becomes this glaring, our traditional intellectual bearings on international politics evaporate.

We are intuitively sensitive to the appearance of a novum of such disquieting strangeness that we fail to name it. We are accustomed to state executives defending readable, long-term strategic calculations. In the present configuration, what seems to prevail is not calculation but jouissance: a hyperviolent exhibition of omnipotence boosted by AI and the collusion of the Pentagon with Silicon Valley. Rulers make a show of power by decapitating adversaries, but all without any idea about the day after these slaughtering demonstrations of force. When it is a matter of enjoying the instant capacity to produce chaos rather than realizing an objective translated into a stable order, political philosophy enters uncharted territories.

These people are not ordinary conquerors or colonizers. They are, above all, psychotic children who take a perverse, abject, and openly nihilistic pleasure in sowing terror, and provoking chaos. What they “want” cannot be formulated as a wanting, since it is chaos—a return to a point prior to all order.

We saw the premises of this shift from a hegemonist strategy toward enjoyment associated with the production of chaos during the second Iraq war. War no longer aims for the mere defeat of the adversary, but for the production of a generalized chaos in their living spaces. It manifests as a historical regression, a cultural collapse, and a thanatopolitics destined to destroy all vital infrastructures and strike at the foundations of the population’s existence.

The Trump band initially set itself to school under the Israeli leaders. Zionist conduct toward the Palestinians has focused less on repressing resistance than on relentlessly undermining the bedrock of their collective existence. It practices a permanent attrition of such intensity that it continuously tips life into perpetual precarity and survival. The continuing Nakba is this uninterrupted process by which the Palestinian people is exposed to a necro-politics of variable intensity. This functions as an inverted biopolitics, a government of a category of the living defined as an encumbering and superfluous species, aiming to prevent them from finding their place among the peoples of the world.

However, we no longer clearly understand what ends the wild bunch assembled around Trump and this manufacture of generalized instability is destined to serve. The propagandist narrative of exporting democracy at gunpoint is obsolete when you bomb those you claim to liberate. Generalized instability has substituted the practices of classical imperialism. Instead of establishing puppet states or unequal economic exchange, this regime mimics climate change: a disordered succession of typhoons, droughts, and plagues acting as an unexpected model for a superpower adrift.

The production of chaos as an end in itself reveals that the Trump clan’s sense of reality is profoundly altered. This is a politico-historical psychosis—an amalgam of schizophrenia and paranoia—where reality is hallucinated. We must distinguish between the clumsy calculations historical rulers have made and this absolute passage into the imaginary. Operation Barbarossa in 1941 was an infinitely risky throw of the dice infected by Hitler’s megalomania, yet it could still be analyzed in terms of rational means and ends. It is not the same today with the US administration, whose international actions are defined by pure illegibility. One day they promise to liberate the Iranian people, the next they threaten to reduce Iranian civilization to ashes.¹On this point see Benoît Bréville, “Une journée comme une autre”, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2026.

Politics by definition unfolds within the field of the possible. Ordinary political rationality grounds itself on taking finitude as its milieu. However, from the perspective of the Trump White House, these frameworks seem to have evaporated.

It takes time to grasp that the public speech of the world’s foremost power has become a form of delirium populated by flagrant counter-truths, obscene trivialities, and saloon braggadocio—rather than the enunciation of real, programmatic intentions. When he promises to mutate Gaza into a Riviera for petro-millionaires or buy Greenland, we are dealing with an absolute dismissal of reality by a potentate in a state of weightlessness. This hyper-presentist regime of intensities and freeze-frames without concatenation, defines him as the pathological incarnation of a malady of the epoch.

Consequently, the primary skill of Secretary of State Marco Rubio is his ability to hold together the scattered fragments of Trump’s international policy. He explains to journalists that behind the zigzags lies a calibrated plan of action.²Le Monde, 8 and 9 May 2026. However, these elements of strategic rationality are entirely fabricated a posteriori. His job is to provide the after-sales service for an erratic campaign, masking a terrible secret: the real matrix of this policy is chaos itself. 

The European leaders of 1914, —famously characterized by historians as sleepwalkers³Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers, 2012. were swept into the maelstrom of conflict by a concatenation of circumstances rather than a reflective choice, driven by the structured ideology of the nation-state and ferocious realism. Conversely, Trump and his pack have completely exited the field of ideology. Instantaneous speech has substituted itself for discourse. It is hyper-presentism. Foreign policy is conducted in tweets presents an immense advantage for this administration: it reduces geopolitical complexity to the conditions of the most skeletal simplicity—the good guys (the USA) versus the bad guys. However, the problem with this radical simplification is that it destroys all capacity for anticipation. 

The major problem with rulers who lose their footing in reality is that their passage to the other side of the looking glass produces entirely tangible, devastating effects. What people believe or fantasize constitutes an integral part of reality because it produces real effects. In the case of political psychotics in the Trump mould, objective reality is entirely fantasized. MAGA becomes an ideological hallucination where geopolitical calculations vanish, leaving the global arena exposed to the volatile whims of a superpower operating within its own destructive imaginary.

The notion of a “strategy of chaos” harbours an untenable tension. Strategy requires a coherent goal and the systemic regulation of human conduct. Because governing the living is the ultimate enemy of chaos, claiming the Trump administration uses this strategy implies a radical hypothesis: they have completely abandoned rendering the world governable.

What substitutes for the modern figure of government is the war of markets. Chaos, expelled through the door of biopolitical governmentality, returns through the window of the tyranny of markets. As rulers morph into the executive power of markets, the government of the living aims to ensure the absolute submission of human life to market conditions. Traditional rationalities yield to a power that is simultaneously tyrannical, volatile, and fundamentally ungovernable.

They do not govern; they attempt to reign, restoring an archaic form of rule where the hubris of the monarch is the centerpiece. Trumpist despotism is modelled on the market, functioning as an absolute monarch whose signature is unpredictability. In an era where financial capital reigns supreme, the hubris of political power contents itself with copying and ornamenting the hubris of the markets.

When reality is no longer interpreted by rulers according to strategic positions, but is replaced entirely by phantasmagorias, rulers yield their place to despots who have prospered on the dunghill of a terminal representative democracy. There exists a distinct relation between this way in which politics becomes unhinged and the chaotic expansion of force, the paroxysms of hyperviolence, discontinuous, carried by an out-of-control death drive.

However, these explosive exercises of violence are not signs of imperial omnipotence but of weakness. The amok who brandishes the kriss and massacres everything within reach is a psychotic drawing the world into his delirium, carried by a mortiferous breath that appears unstoppable. Condemned to endless repetition, these campaigns index the headlong flight of a world power whose conquering trajectory and hegemonic position are coming to a breathless end.

No clinical cure can heal this geopolitical pathology; it can only be interrupted by an external force that annihilates its real-world effects. Consequently, Trump’s enraged drive has radically eliminated diplomacy, substituting structured negotiation with threats, ultimatums, and hollow cries of victory.

Diplomacy is grounded in recognizing the irreducibility of plurality and alterity. Trump and his pack, however, are pilgrims of nothingness operating as fanatical militants of the absolute and the unique. They are cheap providentialists and neo-messianists whose political theology is the geopolitical equivalent of fundamentalist evangelism. Ultimately, the abolition of diplomacy reveals a deeper symptom: these people have unlearned how to speak. They address the world one-way, mimicking the manner in which ancient Greek and Roman masters spoke to their slaves. True speech requires interlocution placed under a strict regime of mutual recognition. Trump’s verbal outbursts function as a perpetual parody of the divine Word, where saying is seamlessly equated with doing.

In the era of artificial intelligence, smart machines can be programmed for interlocution, but they lack the human prerogatives of genuine recognition or “being-for-the-other”. The speech of the Trumpist species is of this machinic type: radically regressive precisely because it is hypermodern. The only structural, constantly foreseeable element in the speech emitted by this executive apparatus is its absolute unpredictability.

The politics of chaos implemented by Trump is the hysterical, terminal iteration of neoliberal deregulation redeployed into international politics. The core matrix of this ideology is the imperative to break free from rules and norms. On the ground, reforms aimed at loosening regulations regularly produce profound social disorders and structural catastrophes. Yet, neoliberal thought remains permanently haunted by the mantra of salutary disorder, treated by its adherents as an uprising of vital forces and a return to individual liberty.

Trump applies this economic ethos to international relations. The imperious necessity to break free from diplomacy and the contempt for international law highlight the structural affinity between deregulation and chaos. This unashamed deployment of brute force signals a return to a mythic state of nature. The world is conceptualised as a vast, lawless frontier where the strong man asserts his law through his fists or his guns. This apocalyptic figure is nourished by ill-digested biblical imagery and a vindictive, mortiferous tone, sharing evident ideological affinities with the Nazis’ existential use of myth.

This frantic race towards the restoration of lost greatness launches its activists entirely into the imaginary, substituting a mythification of origins for any realistic approach to the present. This involution of the capacities for foresight within the leadership of the planet’s primary military power summons the spectre of the General Accident—a catastrophic disruption that terminates the course of normal events. In the historical memory of Europe, this figure is forever named Sarajevo. At the hour of Trump, where the fury of imperial reconquest is boosted by AI, and war passions are accelerated by automated military technologies, the coming of the General Accident can easily be envisaged as a chain reaction where these volatile ingredients collide. It is difficult to imagine that the awakening of our contemporary sleepwalkers will take any other path than that of a systemic disaster. These political automata play with chaos as overexcited children play with matches. Their historical role is already assigned: they are the overcharged pyromaniacs of an approaching era of ruins and ashes.

Alain Brossat is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and long-time activist.

• 1
  On this point see Benoît Bréville, “Une journée comme une autre”, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2026.
• 2
  Le Monde, 8 and 9 May 2026.
• 3
  Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers, 2012.