Tucker Carlson is a media star and an iconic voice of Republican conservatism in the United States. He often provokes strong reactions because of the unconventional positions he sometimes takes. Carlson stands as that rare personality who, however logical or illogical his discourse, always appears to be honest and sincere. Ever since making his declaration of independence in April 2023, when he was asked to leave Fox News, Carlson toes no one’s line.

As an independent broadcaster, Carlson also dares to break many of the rules, not just of the media culture he has long been a part of. He has also acquired the habit of challenging the nation’s dominant political culture. He made headline news when, shortly after leaving Fox, he dared to carry off a long interview in the Kremlin with the man whose voice is never allowed to be heard in US media: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Carlson certainly understood that refusing to talk freely with Putin is part of a strategy designed to leave Western commentators in charge of interpreting Putin’s secret thoughts. They alone know what he is truly thinking, so why bother listening to the man himself? It’s an effective strategy. For example, how many times have we heard from the politicians and the media that once Putin has fully integrated Ukraine into Mother Russia, he will set about conquering Poland, the Baltic States and probably Finland before sending his tanks down France’s Champs-Elysée. Emmanuel Macron, for one, appears to believe that. As does NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who not so long ago, according to Defense News, warned “that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to ‘wipe Ukraine off the map’ and could come after other parts of Europe next.”

Carlson has since become specialized in long, informal interviews with important people in politics. In the context of the Middle East crisis, last week, Carlson interviewed fellow conservative Republican and one-time presidential hopeful, Texan Senator Ted Cruz.

In the course of the interview, Carlson dared to accuse Cruz of being a neocon, ready to intervene and attack foreign countries on the flimsiest of supposedly moral principles. “You’re saying we’re making a moral case,” Carlson claimed at one point, while pointing out that the reasons for attacking Iran, similar to the case of Iraq two decades ago, is being made based on lies. Insisting he isn’t a neocon, at one point Cruz objects: “I’m not in the morality game. I’m in the US interest game.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

In the game:

An expression popular in the United States to designate the area in which people conduct their professional activities, deemed a sport or competition rather than a vocation because in US culture everyone’s role in society is to maneuver in ways that lead to winning at the expense of everyone else, the “losers.”

Contextual note

Cruz is guilty of nothing more serious than using an easy-to-grasp metaphor to make his point. The expression, “in the game of,” has featured in American English for at least a century. It usually appears in the negative formulation, as a form of denial: “I’m not in the game of X,” an assertion similar to “I’m not in the business of X.”

Cruz’s denial of being in the “morality game” tells us a lot about two things: US political culture in general and Cruz’s own lack of seriousness. Games produce results (wins or losses) and scores. But those results, unlike the results of international conflict, have no permanent effect on society. The senator’s formulation conveys the idea that the matter under discussion is just a game, with no serious stakes.  But the matter he evokes is foreign policy — more specifically war and peace — a domain in which the stakes are always serious. We should note, however, that in the US, labeling something as “foreign” means it can only be of marginal interest.

Another distinction will help to understand how US political culture distinguishes between the serious and the trivial. Cruz would never be tempted to talk about what “game” he’s in when discussing immigration policy. Immigration is a “serious” issue that we should never think of in terms of playing a game. Americans treat foreign policy as a distraction, like a team sport. When a war starts, a new season begins. When it ends (as it tends not to do these days), the season is over.

In the same conversation, Cruz has no qualms about contradicting his denial of playing the morality game. At one point, to justify US aggression, he blurts out: “That’s who Iran wants to kill, is all the Jews and all the Americans.”

In other words, he frames the emerging US regime change strategy for Iran in terms of a moral duty to punish an immoral government. His does so on the grounds that people thousands of miles away have a desire to kill Jews and Americans. Carlson laughs at his ignorance of any of the basic facts about Iran, including the size of its population. And clearly Cruz has not tried to explore the meaning of the verbal threats Iranians have been prone to make in the past. Whether it’s “the morality game” or the “control of Middle East oil” game, for him it’s only about who will win or lose. No more of an issue than who will win next year’s Super Bowl.

Historical note

Every culture on earth, throughout history has created, adapted or adopted popular games in which people compete mentally, physically to prove what they are capable of, either individually, collectively or both. The Egyptians and Sumerians invented and played board games as far back as five thousand years ago. Games provide non-threatening opportunities to simulate, experiment, understand and eventually master complex human activities. Over the course of history, these have been related directly or indirectly to religion, sexuality and marriage, business and, of course, war, most directly alluded to in the game of chess. Though they have no applicable purpose, the skills thus cultivated often play a role in implementing strategies of survival and social organization.

Games are built around formal rules and strictly defined contexts that are designed to avoid confusion with social, political and economic reality. But the relationship between games and living history evolves over time. In modern cultures, particularly in the West, the frontier between those two realms of competitive activity appears to be breaking down. Cruz provides an example of how that may happen. By entertaining the idea that political reality is a game, a contest, in which there are winners and losers, rather than as a kind of social ballet serving to knit a complex fabric of society, our understanding of how the world works is diminished. Within every society, complementary forces interact in a variety of ways to facilitate exchange (of information, goods, language, wealth and the arts). If the distinction between social interaction and games is lost, society’s concept of politics inevitably becomes confused with the violence of war, the ultimate and fatal form of competition.

Our age has elevated the idea of national security as everyone’s top core value. This usually translates as an expanding effort aimed at multiplying the physical and technological means of protecting the status quo of existing governments. The surveillance state becomes a universal ideal. US President Donald Trump clearly shares that mindset. But so did former President Joe Biden.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff is now featured in the media quoting examples of Trump’s rhetoric captured from phone calls made over the past week leading up to his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. The litany begins with: “Are they going to win? Is this a winner? Is this game over? They are so good. This is really a showstopper.” The day before authorizing the bombing, Trump said, “If we do this, it needs to be perfect. It needs to be a win. It has to look perfect.” Capping it all, the president summed it up with, “In, boom, out.” In US sport, that is called planning a “buzzer-beater.”

Once upon a time, nations would routinely attempt some form of diplomacy before beginning a war. If it failed, war ensued. In the course of the war, they would then prepare for the diplomatic campaign that would resolve the war. That isn’t what happens in games. And the fact that we no longer see diplomacy at work before a war and that wars are conducted with no “end game” in sight, tells us that civilization has adopted a new set of rules: no rules, other than the logic of force. “Peace through force” in the eyes of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu translates as “might makes right.”

Although his style was different, Biden also reduced foreign policy to a game. Upon taking office in January 2021, he repeatedly claimed that the world was a contest between two teams: democracies and autocracies. That explains why he didn’t bother sitting down, at Putin’s request, to hammer out a framework for European security. The game would be a proxy war.

Trump took the aversion to serious diplomacy one step further when he used officially programmed negotiations as a simple feint in his game strategy that allowed Israel to attack Iran on the pretext of settling by force the very issue the US claimed it was “negotiating.” That attack included an attempted assassination of Iran’s chief negotiator.

One thing seems to be clear in the wake of the last two US presidencies: concerning the fate of what the Biden team tirelessly vaunted as “the rules-based international order.” For that order, it is truly “game over.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.