Absurd New World

Introduction

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove, the United States foreign policy apparatus is satirically immobilized by absurdity as a nuclear threat looms on the horizon. The leadership of the government is left paralyzed by a reality in which bureaucracy and apocalypse converge—until all is disintegrated into oblivion. While the world today is not at the edge of a nuclear catastrophe just yet, the foreign policy of the current administration echoes Kubrick’s deepest fears. A new system is emerging, one that seamlessly blends a Kafkaesque megalomania over deporting international students, individuals with “suspicious tattoos,” and openly innocent citizens, with an economic policy that is far closer to a hollowed-out economic theater than any notion of economic theory.¹ Absurdity in this new political reality has increasingly become the norm—a mode of foreign policy largely unfamiliar to this country in its newly mutated form. 

Kafka in ICEland

The absurdity of today finds its parallels in Kafka’s The Trial, where the main character, Joseph K., finds himself for reasons never revealed, arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime. Not dissimilarly, over the last months, students across the country have been arrested, detained, and stripped of their rightful stay within a country that has for decades proclaimed its unwavering dedication to liberty and freedom of speech.² When Joseph K. questions the reason for his arrest, the authorities promptly respond “[i]t is not our place to tell you that.”³ Analogously, students that have been detained across the country have largely not received any legal reasoning for their detention, with 1300 visas being revoked under the pretense of “national security” as a catch-all justification.⁴ The arrest of Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, which resembled more a kidnapping than an interaction with law enforcement, stands out as the most direct attempt by the administration to steal Kafka’s script. Just as Ozturk was taken away by agents in plain clothing, Joseph K. unsuccessfully attempts to grasp his own arrest:“Which of the authorities is conducting the proceedings? Are you a state official? None of you is in uniform.”⁵⁶ This symbolic blurring between the image of legal detention and unlawful abduction fosters an atmosphere of perpetual fear, a self-policing incentive of the absurdist regime. In this new absurd world, we as international students—just like Kafka’s Joseph K.—find ourselves under an inconspicuously blatant attack. 

These detentions not only mirror Kafka in the literary sense, but also emblematize a new legal architecture which has become decoupled from its own fundamental intent. In this new political climate, justice within the immigration system has become nothing more than a system of symbols, part of a broader theater where innocence and guilt are no longer legal categories, but narrative conveniences in a broader agenda. By invoking national security as an all-encompassing justification, the administration is transforming immigration into an even more dramatic hall of mirrors. Repression is now carried out through a bureaucratic order, that subsumes the values enshrined in its own constitution.⁷ What is most fascinating is the dramatic contrast of these policies with the small-governance and free speech narrative that were so central to this administration’s campaign.⁸ This grotesque absurdity fosters a new legal order where fear dominates freedom and where students like myself are increasingly coerced into silence. We are forced to surrender our right to speak freely in exchange for the illusion of safety.⁹ 

The Biopolitics of Bureaucracy 

Students represent just one facet of an immigration policy that has been weaponized by the executive branch’s opaque bureaucratic authority to enforce its narrative. In this new reality, non‑citizens and citizens alike are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life—the biological existence of a person stripped of all political, social, and cultural attributes, leaving only the capacity to be alive.¹⁰ The recent game of cat and mouse between the leadership of the current administration and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on the fate of Abrego Garcia, a man illegally sent to prison abroad due to an “administrative error,” demonstrates this more clearly than anyone else.¹¹ Both administrations have actively withdrawn their own ability to return a definitively innocent individual home. Bukele has dismissed the idea of returning Abrego Garcia as “absurd” (perversely ironic given the horrid absurdity of the overall situation). Meanwhile, the presidential administration has deflected responsibility by citing bureaucratic limitations and repeating disproven claims of gang affiliation, using legal ambiguity as a shield against accountability.¹²¹³ Tattoos and racial prejudice have become the new law and order, dictating whether one deserves freedom. Notably, it has been made clear that this is only the beginning. “Homegrowns are next.”¹⁴

Kafka demonstrated long ago how a bureaucratic machine can reduce one’s life to nothing: in the final seconds of his life Joseph K. proclaims “like a dog!” before he is executed by a system that has stripped him of humanity.¹⁵ The goal today is precisely the same: to create a society that coerces you into bare life if you step out of line. Yes, you are alive, but with no rights, no dignity, no recourse, and with no more ‘liberty’ than a dog. The presidential administration in its case against Garcia has called this an  “intuitive sense of liberty.”¹⁶ The most insidious danger lies in normalizing this state of exception, turning what should be an extraordinary suspension of rights into an everyday tool of governance. When the absurd becomes the norm, its power grows and the intentionality behind it becomes ever more powerful.

The Economy of Spectacle

Absurdity as policy is not restricted to the world of immigration, however, as starkly portrayed in the administration’s approach to economic foreign policy. If justice now functions as a theater for national security, the economy has become its equally unstable twin—a simulation of productivity and actionability that has abandoned all semblance of material grounding. French thinker Jean Baudrillard terms this phenomenon quite fittingly: transeconomics. Transeconomics is the stage at which the economy no longer functions according to production, value, or market logic—but instead becomes a game of speculation and spectacle governed by floating, arbitrary rules.¹⁷ It imitates the structure of economic rationality while discarding its substance—an “ecstasy of value” where meaning collapses into performance.¹⁸ The administration’s tariff policy has become exactly that, a performance where the standard rules of economic theory are dismissed to make way for unfounded narratives that emphasize the trade deficit as an end-all be-all for the pure purpose of narrative.

Notably, this game seems detached from consequence for the administration which is able to “pause” its policy just as easily, and with as little reason as it had to enforce it in the first place. This in the eyes of Baudrillard is the death of “Political Economy” as we have imagined it— a system in which economics has become “the exacerbation of its own logic to the point of self-parody.”¹⁹ The materiality of economic theory in this context has been to an extent destroyed, replaced by a narrative of tariffs as performative vengeance, and grounded in a formula so arbitrary and contextless that some have even speculated it was drafted by an LLM.²⁰ As a result, by becoming ungrounded from widely accepted theory, this new form of economic policy manufactures a veneer of meaningful action out of orchestrated chaos, and quietly harvests profit from the ensuing market absurdity.²¹ Ironically this system, which “effectively co-opts the energy of poker,” is being directed by a man whose own casinos have been through four bankruptcies.²²²³

Conclusion

This new era is fundamentally shifting foreign policy, blurring the line between governance and absurdity, cruelty and policy, both  domestically and globally. In Kafka’s world, Joseph K. is swallowed by the machine. In ours, the hyperreal, bureaucratic fog has not yet fully submerged the liberty which this country claims to be built on. Baudrillard saw in the collapse not salvation but an opportunity for rupture within a system that is internally combusting, “vanquished by its simulacrum of itself.”²⁴ There may be a future where the system becomes so unreal, so self-parodied, that it can no longer maintain the illusion of order through narrative—even if that seems to be the precise strong suit of those at the helm of this ship today. In Dr. Strangelove, the end comes not with a decisive act of war, but with a farce no one bothers to stop. Absurdity becomes an end in itself— set to the sound of “We’ll Meet Again” and mushroom clouds. If we are not ready to ride the bomb of absurdity into oblivion, we must continue naming it, shining a bright light into the bureaucratic fog and the vague language of securitization to disrupt the complicity the spectacle so actively depends on. Doing this is the only prospect there is for a future where truth is not treated as contraband and free speech as an exclusive club, where obedience is the only currency of entry.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Kafka Self Portrait, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons  | CC License, no changes made

1. Lilia Luciano and Nicole Brown Chau, “ICE Claims Tattoos Tie Migrants to the Tren de Aragua Gang. Experts Say They Aren’t Reliable Identifiers,” CBS News, April 8, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-tattoos-tren-de-aragua-venezuela-gang/. ↩︎
2. Miranda Jeyaretnam, “These Are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism,” Time, April 1, 2025, https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/. ↩︎
3. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell, with introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. ↩︎
4. Guardian staff and agency, “Foreign Students Sue Trump Officials over Revoked Visas as 1,000 Affected,” The Guardian, April 17, 2025, 4:25 p.m. CEST, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/trump-international-students-visas. ↩︎
5. John Hudson, “No Evidence Linking Tufts Student to Antisemitism or Terrorism, State Dept. Office Found,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/13/tufts-student-rumeysa-ozturk-rubio-trump/. ↩︎
6. Kafka, The Trial, 12. ↩︎
7. Nicholas Riccardi and Christine Fernando, “Trump Campaigned as a Protector of Free Speech but Critics Say His Actions Threaten It,” PBS NewsHour, March 12, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-campaigned-as-a-protector-of-free-speech-but-critics-say-his-actions-threaten-it. ↩︎
8. White House, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” Presidential Actions, January 2025. ↩︎
9. Anvee Bhutani, “Student journalists remove stories on Trump,” The Guardian, April 7, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/student-journalists-remove-stories-trump. ↩︎
10. “Bare life,” in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), accessed April 15, 2025, https://www.oxfordreference.com/.
    ↩︎
11. Nick Miroff, “An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison,” The Atlantic,  March 31, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/. ↩︎
12. BBC News, “BBC News Live,” accessed April 15, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwy03j9vddlt. ↩︎
13. Nina Totenberg and Christina Gatti, “Supreme Court Says Trump Officials Should Help Return Wrongly Deported Maryland Man,” NPR, April 10, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/10/nx-s1-5358421/supreme-court-abrego-garcia-deportation-decision. ↩︎
14. Brian Mann, “‘Homegrowns Are Next’: Trump Hopes to Deport and Jail U.S. Citizens Abroad,” Morning Edition, NPR, April 16, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador. ↩︎
15. Kafka, The Trial, 165. ↩︎
16. United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Kilmarn Armando Abrego Garcia v. Kristi Noem. No. 25‑1404. Filed April 17, 2025. ↩︎
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), 35. ↩︎
18. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎
19. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎
20. Dominic Preston, “Trump’s New Tariff Math Looks a Lot Like ChatGPT’s,” The Verge, April 3, 2025, https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok. ↩︎
21. Karni, Annie. 2025. “Greene Bought Market Dip Before Trump Paused Tariffs, Profiting From the Rally.” New York Times, April 14, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-bought-stock-trump-tariffs-pause.html. ↩︎
22. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎
23. Jonathan Lipson, “Bankruptcy Expert Studies Trump Casinos,” Temple Now, October 25, 2016, https://news.temple.edu/news/2016-10-25/bankruptcy-expert-studies-trump-casinos. ↩︎
24. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 35. ↩︎

Author

Yegor Rubanov

Yegor is a member of the class of 2027 double majoring in economics and global affairs. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine he's interested in the intersection of philosophy, literature and contemporary geopolitics. On campus you can find him playing IMs for JE, teaching for Yale Hemispheres, or playing chess.

Staff Writer