Why Was Judas Historically Necessary?
Judas as Paradigm: Breaking from Within
At certain historical moments, betrayal doesn't come from outside but from within. This kind of fracture carries special weight because it not only challenges norms or alliances but destabilizes the symbolic core of a system. The figures of Judas and Brutus embody this type of betrayal. Similarly, on a contemporary geopolitical level, the tariff policies of Donald Trump toward traditional allies can be viewed in the same light.
Judas was not an external opponent to Jesus: he was part of his innermost circle, one of the twelve apostles. He betrayed not just a person, but a direct bond with the sacred. Brutus, for his part, was not simply a Roman senator: he was someone close to Julius Caesar, even considered by many as his protégé. His stab was not only physical, but also symbolic: a denial of the legitimacy of Rome's central power from within the circle of trust.
Something similar happened when Donald Trump decided to impose tariffs on products from countries like Germany, France, or Canada. Since the end of World War II, the United States had been the main driver of the liberal international economic order: free trade, multilateral alliances, open markets. Institutions such as the GATT (forerunner of the WTO) were created with U.S. support and leadership to cement that logic. Trump did not challenge that model from an external or alternative stance but from the presidency of the country that designed and sustained it for decades.
In this context, imposing trade barriers on allied countries is not merely another protectionist measure. It entails breaking with the foundational agreement of the liberal Western order: the idea that free and fluid trade among capitalist democracies is the basis of global stability. That arrangement had not just economic implications but ideological ones: it articulated a shared worldview. The fracture isn’t only political or strategic, but ontological: it affects the deep meaning of what the system is.
The ontological—that is, concerning the way we conceive and understand being and the order of things—is not easily broken. But when it breaks, no technical rules can repair it. The model’s coherence is lost, along with its internal logic.
Breaking it means leaving behind the consensus established in the post-war period, especially after 1945, when the U.S. and Europe began to project themselves as a united economic and political bloc facing the world. In simple terms: if for over half a century free trade had been the symbol of trust and cooperation among allies, tariffs turned it into a field of contention.
Dante, in The Divine Comedy, places Judas and Brutus at the center of Hell, not because of the scale of their crimes but for the kind of betrayal they represent: they do not destroy from outside, but from within. In that symbolic logic, Trump assumes a similar role. He is not confronting the Western system from a critical periphery, but from the power core, breaking the rules that gave meaning to the whole.
This comparison is not intended to equate individuals, but to recognize a historical pattern: internal betrayal destabilizes because it alters the way the world is understood. It is no longer a conflict between different models, but a rupture within the dominant model itself. What collapses is not just an alliance, but the moral, symbolic, and ontological structure on which it stood. This kind of disruption cannot be fixed with new rules, because what is lost is trust as a structuring category. And without it, the entire ideological edifice wavers.