It rarely collapses into dictatorship in a single dramatic instant. The Roman Republic did not disappear overnight, nor did it collapse in a single coup. It decayed gradually and it happens when institutions that once restrained power gradually surrender to men who claim that permanent war and national survival justify extraordinary authority. The Senate remained, elections continued and laws were still passed. Yet the system increasingly revolved around a single reality: loyalty to the ruler outweighed loyalty to institutions. The Senate continued to sit, debate, and vote long after it had ceased to restrain the men who dominated it. Julius Caesar and later Augustus did not abolish the Republic; they inherited it hollowed out — hollowed it out through a mixture of public fear, military prestige, patronage, and senatorial acquiescence — its institutions intact but subordinated to the will of the ruler.
In the twenty-first century, critics increasingly argue that something disturbingly similar is unfolding in modern geopolitics through the alliance between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Their partnership—built on militarised foreign policy, personalised leadership, hostility to international law and oversight, and the systematic marginalisation of institutions meant to restrain state violence through ‘dissent’ has fused these elements to resemble a modern form of Caesarism.
The rise of leaders such as Julius Caesar and later Augustus was not simply the story of ambitious men. It was the story of institutions surrendering their authority in the name of security, war, and stability.
Ancient Rome provides the clearest historical warning. The Roman Senate remained intact as the Republic decayed, eventually legitimising the rise of the Caesars. The forms of republican government survived, but the substance did not.
The comparison is not that the United States or Israel is “Rome again” in any literal sense. It is that both men have repeatedly practiced a recognizably Caesarist politics: rule through permanent emergency, elevation of personal loyalty over institutional independence, punishment of dissent, and contempt for restraining bodies at home and abroad when those bodies obstruct executive will. Their politics are not identical, but they rhyme in ways that should alarm anyone concerned with democratic government.
The consequences of which are being felt most profoundly in Palestine, but their implications extend across the international system.
The late Roman Republic became vulnerable to domination because crisis became the normal language of rule. External war, internal conspiracy, and civil conflict were used to justify extraordinary commands. Caesar’s ascent was inseparable from military glory and the argument that only exceptional leadership could secure Rome’s future. Augustus then perfected the method: he preserved republican language while monopolizing real authority, presenting personal predominance as the price of stability.
The Roman Caesars rose through war. Military success provided prestige, legitimacy, and the justification for extraordinary powers. Modern critics argue that Trump and Netanyahu have embraced a similar model: governance through permanent conflict.
Trump and Netanyahu have each governed through an analogous politics of emergency - a world of existential threats that require overwhelming force and permanent vigilance.
Trump has long framed foreign and domestic politics alike as existential struggles requiring personalized executive action. In his second term he moved quickly to centralize control over the executive branch, with a February 18, 2025, White House order declaring it the policy of the executive branch to ensure “Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch,” including agencies previously structured to have a measure of independence.
Netanyahu has likewise governed through continual securitization. Since returning to office in late 2022, he formed what Reuters described as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, empowering coalition partners whose politics fused maximal military force with hostility to judicial and diplomatic restraint. Reuters reported that coalition agreements gave Itamar Ben-Gvir authority over police as national security minister and gave Bezalel Smotrich’s camp broad powers over West Bank planning and administration, deepening executive and ideological control over coercive state machinery.
War in this context becomes not only policy but political theatre: the leader as wartime commander, the nation in perpetual danger, and dissent cast as weakness.
A revealing parallel between the late Roman Republic and modern strongman politics lies in how dissent is treated once power begins concentrating around a dominant leader. During the rise of Julius Caesar and later Augustus, several senators resisted the erosion of republican authority. Cato the Younger among the most prominent defender of senatorial independence, vehemently opposed Caesar’s accumulation of power and the weakening of the Republic’s constitutional norms. Even the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE, believing it the last remaining defence of the Republic, did not restore the Senate’s authority; instead, it triggered a civil war that ended with the rise of Augustus, who consolidated power while gradually neutralising remaining senatorial opposition through exile, forced political marginalisation, or absorption into his patronage network. The lesson of this period is stark: dissent within republican institutions became increasingly dangerous as the political system transformed into personal rule.
A modern comparison can be drawn to the political environments surrounding Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. While contemporary democracies obviously differ from ancient Rome, both leaders have been widely accused by opponents of treating dissent—especially from within their own political or security establishments—as disloyalty rather than legitimate disagreement. Trump has repeatedly attacked critics within government, the judiciary, and the military as corrupt or traitorous, while Netanyahu has removed or sidelined senior officials who publicly disagreed with his wartime strategy. In both cases, it is argued that the political climate increasingly pressures insiders to demonstrate loyalty to the leader rather than independent judgement. As in late republican Rome, institutions formally remain intact—but the political cost of dissent rises sharply as leadership becomes more personalised and conflict-driven.
One of the core features of Caesarist rule is patronage. Rome’s great men surrounded themselves with clients whose advancement depended on personal loyalty. As senatorial authority weakened, access to the ruler became more important than fidelity to impersonal institutions. Augustus, in particular, made senatorial careers dependent on his goodwill.
A comparable dynamic has developed within the Trump–Netanyahu political alliance.
Both leaders have elevated loyalists to key positions while marginalising or removing figures perceived as insufficiently supportive. Political appointments become instruments of control rather than neutral governance.
Trump’s recent appointments fit that pattern with unusual clarity. Reuters described Pam Bondi, nominated on November 21, 2024, and confirmed on February 4, 2025, as a Trump “loyalist” and “staunchest political ally” elevated to lead the Justice Department. Reuters likewise described Kash Patel, nominated on December 1, 2024, and confirmed on February 20, 2025, as a Trump “loyalist” and “loyal defender” placed atop the FBI. Those are not neutral bureaucratic placements. They are politically meaningful efforts to put personally trusted allies in command of institutions that, in a constitutional order, are supposed to retain independence from the ruler’s private interests.
Trump’s broader staffing and purge strategy reinforces the point. Reuters reported that on January 25, 2025, he fired 17 inspectors general in what critics called a late-night purge, raising alarm that independent watchdogs could be replaced by loyalists. Reuters also reported that he announced the removal of more than 1,000 Biden appointees and publicly named figures, including Mark Milley, in a performative assertion of personal power.
Netanyahu’s appointments show the same logic in a different institutional setting. He built his governing coalition by empowering ideologically hardline allies such as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Reuters also reported that his government pushed judicial changes that would hinder oversight of ministerial appointments and were partly designed to facilitate the political return of Aryeh Deri after Israel’s Supreme Court ordered Netanyahu to dismiss him because of his tax-fraud conviction. In other words, the governing project was not only to appoint allies, but to weaken the legal mechanisms that could disqualify or restrain them.
That is precisely the Roman pattern: institutions remain, but they are repurposed to ratify the ruler’s patronage network rather than discipline it. The Senate in Rome did not vanish; it became increasingly dependent. Congress and the Knesset have not vanished either. The danger is that they normalize executive encroachment by accepting the logic that the leader must control every strategically important office.
Caesarist politics cannot tolerate principled opposition for very long. Once the ruler’s person is equated with the state, dissent becomes betrayal. That was one of the pathologies of the late Republic: political rivalry escalated into civil enmity because opponents were no longer treated as legitimate competitors inside a shared constitutional order.
Trump’s treatment of dissent repeatedly follows that logic. Reuters reported that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth revoked retired General Mark Milley’s security clearance and protective detail in January 2025, after Milley had become one of Trump’s most prominent military critics. Reuters also reported the Pentagon removed Milley’s portrait and that Trump had suggested Milley could be executed for treason, language that collapses dissent into quasi-criminal betrayal. Reuters further reported on a broader “loyalty test” atmosphere in national security staffing, with outside Trump allies reportedly identifying officials as insufficiently loyal.
Netanyahu’s treatment of dissent within his own wartime cabinet offers a close analogue. Reuters reported that on November 5, 2024, Netanyahu fired Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, citing a “crisis of trust” after months of disagreement over the conduct of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Gallant had diverged from Netanyahu on key strategic and political questions, including war management and other matters touching accountability. Netanyahu replaced him with Israel Katz, described by Reuters as a close ally. That is classic strongman logic: when substantive disagreement emerges at the top, the problem is framed not as strategy but as trust, and the solution is replacement by a more reliable loyalist.
There is a Roman resonance here too. Augustus mastered the language of consensus while ensuring that meaningful dissent became politically costly. The institutions continued to speak, but only inside a field already structured by the ruler’s supremacy. That is how republics lose substance before they lose ceremony.
The Roman Caesars did not merely wage war abroad; military command was central to personal prestige and domestic legitimacy. Foreign policy became inseparable from internal regime construction. Caesar’s conquests in Gaul made him politically unassailable until the constitutional system could no longer contain the consequences.
Trump’s foreign policy style has consistently glorified coercion, unilateralism, and disdain for multilateral restraint. On February 4, 2025, Reuters reported that Trump signed orders tied to withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council and disengaging from UNRWA, while publicly saying the U.N. had to “get its act together.” In January 2026, Reuters further reported that his administration announced withdrawal from dozens of international organizations, including 31 U.N.-related entities, underscoring a broader attack on multilateral governance itself.
Netanyahu’s government has fused aggressive military conduct with contempt for outside restraint even more starkly. Reuters reported that the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, ordered Israel to take measures to prevent acts of genocide and improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza; Reuters also reported that the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant on November 21, 2024, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel rejects the ICC’s jurisdiction and denies war crimes, but the point for comparison is institutional: external legal restraint has been met not with deference but with rejection and counterattack.
The Caesarist politics thrives when violence is narrated as necessity and accountability as sabotage. The ruler claims that survival requires force without meaningful external judgment. That is not a Roman detail; it is a recurring political form.
A republic in decline often preserves outward legality while attacking the institutions capable of imposing real limits. In Rome, the Senate gradually ceased to be an independent centre of power and became instead a stage on which executive dominance was clothed in constitutional language.
Trump’s hostility to international oversight is well documented. Reuters reported that in his second term he withdrew or disengaged from major U.N. bodies, including the Human Rights Council, and later moved to leave dozens more international organizations. Reuters also reported that he authorized sanctions aimed at ICC personnel over investigations involving the United States and Israel, a federal judge later blocked enforcement of that order on constitutional grounds. Reuters additionally reported sanctions on U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese after work tied to criticism of Israel’s conduct.
Netanyahu’s camp has acted similarly toward U.N. bodies and officials who publicly condemned Israeli conduct. Reuters reported that Israel barred U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres from entering the country in October 2024, declaring him persona non grata. Reuters also reported sustained Israeli attacks on UNRWA, including legislation to block its operations and rhetoric from Israeli officials dismissing humanitarian criticism as “activism” or worse. In January 2026 Reuters reported that Guterres warned he could refer Israel to the ICJ over actions against UNRWA and seized assets, while Israel dismissed the U.N. letter and again accused UNRWA of terrorism links.
This is one of the strongest parallels to the Roman story. Once a ruler treats oversight bodies as illegitimate whenever they constrain him, law becomes ornamental. The Senate under Augustus still existed; its function was increasingly to legitimate pre-made power. In modern terms, the more Congress, the Knesset, or international bodies are bypassed, intimidated, or converted into instruments of ratification, the more the constitutional shell remains while the republican substance drains away.
The most historically serious comparison is not Caesar to Trump or Augustus to Netanyahu as personalities. It is the relationship between the ruler and the institutions that choose accommodation over confrontation.
Rome’s Senate bears direct responsibility for its own eclipse. Augustus did not destroy senatorial prestige by brute force alone. He preserved the Senate, honoured it ceremonially, and used it. Although the Senate remained, real power rested with Augustus and senatorial careers depended on his goodwill. That is the anatomy of elite collaboration: institutions surrender substance in exchange for survival, status, and proximity.
That pattern is visible in both contemporary cases. In the United States, a Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Bondi and Patel despite widespread concern that each embodied personal loyalty to Trump at the head of law-enforcement institutions. In Israel, Netanyahu’s parliamentary coalition repeatedly backed judicial and executive changes that critics said would weaken oversight and increase political control over state institutions, including the judiciary and ministerial appointments.
This is how senates die: not always through abolition, but through consent. They become spectators to their own diminution, then participants in it.
Even though Rome was not a modern democracy and the U.S. and Israel are not ancient aristocratic republics, the Roman Republic did not fall because the Senate disappeared. It fell because the Senate remained while ceasing to matter.
That is why the comparison is so disturbing. Trump and Netanyahu each embody a politics in which war magnifies the leader, loyalists colonize institutions, dissent becomes disloyalty, and oversight bodies are smeared as enemies of the nation. Their aggression abroad and their contempt for restraint at home are not separate phenomena; they are part of the same governing logic.
The power exercised by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu does not exist in isolation. It is sustained by political institutions and allied governments that continue to provide diplomatic protection, military cooperation, and political legitimacy. Legislatures approve funding, governments supply weapons and intelligence, and powerful states shield allies from meaningful consequences in international forums. In doing so, they often justify their actions in the same language used by Rome’s senators: stability, security, and the necessity of standing behind allies in times of crisis.
The result is a system in which the institutions meant to restrain power instead help sustain it. International law is invoked selectively. Diplomatic institutions condemn violence yet struggle to stop it. Governments that publicly defend a rules-based order often make exceptions when their closest partners are involved. In this environment, accountability becomes increasingly fragile.
Rome shows how such moments can unfold. The Senate believed it was preserving order by accommodating rising imperial power. Instead, it gradually reduced itself to a ceremonial institution—one that endorsed decisions already made elsewhere. The republic survived in name, but its substance had drained away.
History’s darker lesson is that empires rarely emerge solely through conquest. More often they arise through consent—through institutions that slowly adapt themselves to the authority they once existed to restrain. The danger for the modern world is not only the actions of powerful leaders, but the willingness of political systems around them to accept those actions as the price of stability.
If Rome teaches anything, it is this: republics seldom recognise the moment when they stop being republics.
Caesarism always presents itself as rescue. It says that institutions are too slow, too weak, too compromised for the emergencies of the age. It asks the public to trust the strong man and asks the legislature to yield “temporarily.” Rome shows the potential of what comes next: the forms of the republic survive, but the republic itself becomes a memory.
In the twenty-first century, critics increasingly argue that something disturbingly similar is unfolding in modern geopolitics through the alliance between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Their partnership—built on militarised foreign policy, personalised leadership, hostility to international law and oversight, and the systematic marginalisation of institutions meant to restrain state violence through ‘dissent’ has fused these elements to resemble a modern form of Caesarism.
The rise of leaders such as Julius Caesar and later Augustus was not simply the story of ambitious men. It was the story of institutions surrendering their authority in the name of security, war, and stability.
Ancient Rome provides the clearest historical warning. The Roman Senate remained intact as the Republic decayed, eventually legitimising the rise of the Caesars. The forms of republican government survived, but the substance did not.
The comparison is not that the United States or Israel is “Rome again” in any literal sense. It is that both men have repeatedly practiced a recognizably Caesarist politics: rule through permanent emergency, elevation of personal loyalty over institutional independence, punishment of dissent, and contempt for restraining bodies at home and abroad when those bodies obstruct executive will. Their politics are not identical, but they rhyme in ways that should alarm anyone concerned with democratic government.
The consequences of which are being felt most profoundly in Palestine, but their implications extend across the international system.
The late Roman Republic became vulnerable to domination because crisis became the normal language of rule. External war, internal conspiracy, and civil conflict were used to justify extraordinary commands. Caesar’s ascent was inseparable from military glory and the argument that only exceptional leadership could secure Rome’s future. Augustus then perfected the method: he preserved republican language while monopolizing real authority, presenting personal predominance as the price of stability.
The Roman Caesars rose through war. Military success provided prestige, legitimacy, and the justification for extraordinary powers. Modern critics argue that Trump and Netanyahu have embraced a similar model: governance through permanent conflict.
Trump and Netanyahu have each governed through an analogous politics of emergency - a world of existential threats that require overwhelming force and permanent vigilance.
Trump has long framed foreign and domestic politics alike as existential struggles requiring personalized executive action. In his second term he moved quickly to centralize control over the executive branch, with a February 18, 2025, White House order declaring it the policy of the executive branch to ensure “Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch,” including agencies previously structured to have a measure of independence.
Netanyahu has likewise governed through continual securitization. Since returning to office in late 2022, he formed what Reuters described as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, empowering coalition partners whose politics fused maximal military force with hostility to judicial and diplomatic restraint. Reuters reported that coalition agreements gave Itamar Ben-Gvir authority over police as national security minister and gave Bezalel Smotrich’s camp broad powers over West Bank planning and administration, deepening executive and ideological control over coercive state machinery.
War in this context becomes not only policy but political theatre: the leader as wartime commander, the nation in perpetual danger, and dissent cast as weakness.
A revealing parallel between the late Roman Republic and modern strongman politics lies in how dissent is treated once power begins concentrating around a dominant leader. During the rise of Julius Caesar and later Augustus, several senators resisted the erosion of republican authority. Cato the Younger among the most prominent defender of senatorial independence, vehemently opposed Caesar’s accumulation of power and the weakening of the Republic’s constitutional norms. Even the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE, believing it the last remaining defence of the Republic, did not restore the Senate’s authority; instead, it triggered a civil war that ended with the rise of Augustus, who consolidated power while gradually neutralising remaining senatorial opposition through exile, forced political marginalisation, or absorption into his patronage network. The lesson of this period is stark: dissent within republican institutions became increasingly dangerous as the political system transformed into personal rule.
A modern comparison can be drawn to the political environments surrounding Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. While contemporary democracies obviously differ from ancient Rome, both leaders have been widely accused by opponents of treating dissent—especially from within their own political or security establishments—as disloyalty rather than legitimate disagreement. Trump has repeatedly attacked critics within government, the judiciary, and the military as corrupt or traitorous, while Netanyahu has removed or sidelined senior officials who publicly disagreed with his wartime strategy. In both cases, it is argued that the political climate increasingly pressures insiders to demonstrate loyalty to the leader rather than independent judgement. As in late republican Rome, institutions formally remain intact—but the political cost of dissent rises sharply as leadership becomes more personalised and conflict-driven.
One of the core features of Caesarist rule is patronage. Rome’s great men surrounded themselves with clients whose advancement depended on personal loyalty. As senatorial authority weakened, access to the ruler became more important than fidelity to impersonal institutions. Augustus, in particular, made senatorial careers dependent on his goodwill.
A comparable dynamic has developed within the Trump–Netanyahu political alliance.
Both leaders have elevated loyalists to key positions while marginalising or removing figures perceived as insufficiently supportive. Political appointments become instruments of control rather than neutral governance.
Trump’s recent appointments fit that pattern with unusual clarity. Reuters described Pam Bondi, nominated on November 21, 2024, and confirmed on February 4, 2025, as a Trump “loyalist” and “staunchest political ally” elevated to lead the Justice Department. Reuters likewise described Kash Patel, nominated on December 1, 2024, and confirmed on February 20, 2025, as a Trump “loyalist” and “loyal defender” placed atop the FBI. Those are not neutral bureaucratic placements. They are politically meaningful efforts to put personally trusted allies in command of institutions that, in a constitutional order, are supposed to retain independence from the ruler’s private interests.
Trump’s broader staffing and purge strategy reinforces the point. Reuters reported that on January 25, 2025, he fired 17 inspectors general in what critics called a late-night purge, raising alarm that independent watchdogs could be replaced by loyalists. Reuters also reported that he announced the removal of more than 1,000 Biden appointees and publicly named figures, including Mark Milley, in a performative assertion of personal power.
Netanyahu’s appointments show the same logic in a different institutional setting. He built his governing coalition by empowering ideologically hardline allies such as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Reuters also reported that his government pushed judicial changes that would hinder oversight of ministerial appointments and were partly designed to facilitate the political return of Aryeh Deri after Israel’s Supreme Court ordered Netanyahu to dismiss him because of his tax-fraud conviction. In other words, the governing project was not only to appoint allies, but to weaken the legal mechanisms that could disqualify or restrain them.
That is precisely the Roman pattern: institutions remain, but they are repurposed to ratify the ruler’s patronage network rather than discipline it. The Senate in Rome did not vanish; it became increasingly dependent. Congress and the Knesset have not vanished either. The danger is that they normalize executive encroachment by accepting the logic that the leader must control every strategically important office.
Caesarist politics cannot tolerate principled opposition for very long. Once the ruler’s person is equated with the state, dissent becomes betrayal. That was one of the pathologies of the late Republic: political rivalry escalated into civil enmity because opponents were no longer treated as legitimate competitors inside a shared constitutional order.
Trump’s treatment of dissent repeatedly follows that logic. Reuters reported that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth revoked retired General Mark Milley’s security clearance and protective detail in January 2025, after Milley had become one of Trump’s most prominent military critics. Reuters also reported the Pentagon removed Milley’s portrait and that Trump had suggested Milley could be executed for treason, language that collapses dissent into quasi-criminal betrayal. Reuters further reported on a broader “loyalty test” atmosphere in national security staffing, with outside Trump allies reportedly identifying officials as insufficiently loyal.
Netanyahu’s treatment of dissent within his own wartime cabinet offers a close analogue. Reuters reported that on November 5, 2024, Netanyahu fired Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, citing a “crisis of trust” after months of disagreement over the conduct of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Gallant had diverged from Netanyahu on key strategic and political questions, including war management and other matters touching accountability. Netanyahu replaced him with Israel Katz, described by Reuters as a close ally. That is classic strongman logic: when substantive disagreement emerges at the top, the problem is framed not as strategy but as trust, and the solution is replacement by a more reliable loyalist.
There is a Roman resonance here too. Augustus mastered the language of consensus while ensuring that meaningful dissent became politically costly. The institutions continued to speak, but only inside a field already structured by the ruler’s supremacy. That is how republics lose substance before they lose ceremony.
The Roman Caesars did not merely wage war abroad; military command was central to personal prestige and domestic legitimacy. Foreign policy became inseparable from internal regime construction. Caesar’s conquests in Gaul made him politically unassailable until the constitutional system could no longer contain the consequences.
Trump’s foreign policy style has consistently glorified coercion, unilateralism, and disdain for multilateral restraint. On February 4, 2025, Reuters reported that Trump signed orders tied to withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council and disengaging from UNRWA, while publicly saying the U.N. had to “get its act together.” In January 2026, Reuters further reported that his administration announced withdrawal from dozens of international organizations, including 31 U.N.-related entities, underscoring a broader attack on multilateral governance itself.
Netanyahu’s government has fused aggressive military conduct with contempt for outside restraint even more starkly. Reuters reported that the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, ordered Israel to take measures to prevent acts of genocide and improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza; Reuters also reported that the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant on November 21, 2024, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel rejects the ICC’s jurisdiction and denies war crimes, but the point for comparison is institutional: external legal restraint has been met not with deference but with rejection and counterattack.
The Caesarist politics thrives when violence is narrated as necessity and accountability as sabotage. The ruler claims that survival requires force without meaningful external judgment. That is not a Roman detail; it is a recurring political form.
A republic in decline often preserves outward legality while attacking the institutions capable of imposing real limits. In Rome, the Senate gradually ceased to be an independent centre of power and became instead a stage on which executive dominance was clothed in constitutional language.
Trump’s hostility to international oversight is well documented. Reuters reported that in his second term he withdrew or disengaged from major U.N. bodies, including the Human Rights Council, and later moved to leave dozens more international organizations. Reuters also reported that he authorized sanctions aimed at ICC personnel over investigations involving the United States and Israel, a federal judge later blocked enforcement of that order on constitutional grounds. Reuters additionally reported sanctions on U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese after work tied to criticism of Israel’s conduct.
Netanyahu’s camp has acted similarly toward U.N. bodies and officials who publicly condemned Israeli conduct. Reuters reported that Israel barred U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres from entering the country in October 2024, declaring him persona non grata. Reuters also reported sustained Israeli attacks on UNRWA, including legislation to block its operations and rhetoric from Israeli officials dismissing humanitarian criticism as “activism” or worse. In January 2026 Reuters reported that Guterres warned he could refer Israel to the ICJ over actions against UNRWA and seized assets, while Israel dismissed the U.N. letter and again accused UNRWA of terrorism links.
This is one of the strongest parallels to the Roman story. Once a ruler treats oversight bodies as illegitimate whenever they constrain him, law becomes ornamental. The Senate under Augustus still existed; its function was increasingly to legitimate pre-made power. In modern terms, the more Congress, the Knesset, or international bodies are bypassed, intimidated, or converted into instruments of ratification, the more the constitutional shell remains while the republican substance drains away.
The most historically serious comparison is not Caesar to Trump or Augustus to Netanyahu as personalities. It is the relationship between the ruler and the institutions that choose accommodation over confrontation.
Rome’s Senate bears direct responsibility for its own eclipse. Augustus did not destroy senatorial prestige by brute force alone. He preserved the Senate, honoured it ceremonially, and used it. Although the Senate remained, real power rested with Augustus and senatorial careers depended on his goodwill. That is the anatomy of elite collaboration: institutions surrender substance in exchange for survival, status, and proximity.
That pattern is visible in both contemporary cases. In the United States, a Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Bondi and Patel despite widespread concern that each embodied personal loyalty to Trump at the head of law-enforcement institutions. In Israel, Netanyahu’s parliamentary coalition repeatedly backed judicial and executive changes that critics said would weaken oversight and increase political control over state institutions, including the judiciary and ministerial appointments.
This is how senates die: not always through abolition, but through consent. They become spectators to their own diminution, then participants in it.
Even though Rome was not a modern democracy and the U.S. and Israel are not ancient aristocratic republics, the Roman Republic did not fall because the Senate disappeared. It fell because the Senate remained while ceasing to matter.
That is why the comparison is so disturbing. Trump and Netanyahu each embody a politics in which war magnifies the leader, loyalists colonize institutions, dissent becomes disloyalty, and oversight bodies are smeared as enemies of the nation. Their aggression abroad and their contempt for restraint at home are not separate phenomena; they are part of the same governing logic.
The power exercised by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu does not exist in isolation. It is sustained by political institutions and allied governments that continue to provide diplomatic protection, military cooperation, and political legitimacy. Legislatures approve funding, governments supply weapons and intelligence, and powerful states shield allies from meaningful consequences in international forums. In doing so, they often justify their actions in the same language used by Rome’s senators: stability, security, and the necessity of standing behind allies in times of crisis.
The result is a system in which the institutions meant to restrain power instead help sustain it. International law is invoked selectively. Diplomatic institutions condemn violence yet struggle to stop it. Governments that publicly defend a rules-based order often make exceptions when their closest partners are involved. In this environment, accountability becomes increasingly fragile.
Rome shows how such moments can unfold. The Senate believed it was preserving order by accommodating rising imperial power. Instead, it gradually reduced itself to a ceremonial institution—one that endorsed decisions already made elsewhere. The republic survived in name, but its substance had drained away.
History’s darker lesson is that empires rarely emerge solely through conquest. More often they arise through consent—through institutions that slowly adapt themselves to the authority they once existed to restrain. The danger for the modern world is not only the actions of powerful leaders, but the willingness of political systems around them to accept those actions as the price of stability.
If Rome teaches anything, it is this: republics seldom recognise the moment when they stop being republics.
Caesarism always presents itself as rescue. It says that institutions are too slow, too weak, too compromised for the emergencies of the age. It asks the public to trust the strong man and asks the legislature to yield “temporarily.” Rome shows the potential of what comes next: the forms of the republic survive, but the republic itself becomes a memory.
⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast.
