Human “oneness”
represents an incontestable truth. It is axiomatic. At the
same time, all derivative imperatives of universal cooperation
remain subordinate to belligerent nationalism.
Why? The contradictions
are glaring. Everywhere, including the United States, national
governance continues to rest on conspicuously “false”
ideals of “everyone for himself.”
In such determinative
matters, nothing truly fundamental ever seems to change.
What next? The
negative outcomes of these contradictions are stark and
unambiguous. For the most part, they suggest endless spasms
of war, terrorism, and genocide. It follows, among other
things, that without a more willing rejection of “everyone
for himself” philosophies, the American nation and
many others will be left increasingly fragile. Already,
roiled by needlessly rancorous national behaviours, we can
expect only further increments of unsustainable decline.
There are also
pertinent specifics. It’s not just about general or
overarching conditions. Credible national expectations exist
not only in the tangible matters of weapons and infrastructure,
but also in variously underlying national security doctrines.
Core issues
here are not really complicated. In these unprecedented
nuclear times – times that are sui generis by any
plausible definition – zero-sum orientations to national
security are more-or-less destined to fail. In the final
analysis, recalling French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin, this intolerable “destiny” exists
because such consistently shortsighted orientations are
“false and against nature.”
History can
be instructive. By definition, former US President Donald
J. Trump’s “America First” misfired on
all cylinders. Trump’s conflict-directed orientation,
driven by gratuitous rancour and a narrowly bitter acrimony,
portended more than “just” incessant geopolitical
loss. It also signified a doctrine-based incapacity to protect
the United States from catastrophic wars. In a worst-case
but still easily-imagined scenario, such wars could quickly
become nuclear.
A once-distant
prospect is being rendered less unimaginable because of
Russia’s escalating aggressions against Ukraine.
To progress
beyond the self-reinforcing debilities of “America
First,” America’s national security problems
should be assessed in proper analytic context. From the
mid-seventeenth century to the current moment – that
is, during the continuously corrosive historical period
that dates back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 –
our inherently adversarial “state system” has
produced neither peace or justice. Prima facie,
there is nothing on any foreseeable horizon that points
promisingly to national or world system transformations.
Even now, we
cling desperately to the “unspeakable lies”
of politics.
Exactly where
does the persistently fragmented world political system
“stand?” To begin, global anarchy is not about
to disappear or give way to more rational configurations
of cooperative security. This evident lack of world-system
governance can never become a propitious context for civilizational
atonement, advancement, or human survival. Though generally
unacknowledged, Realpolitik or power politics has always
proven its own insubstantiality.
As a single
state in world politics – and as a “powerful”
player among almost 200 unequal nation-states – the
US is not immune from planet-wide responsibilities. This
sober conclusion about global peace and justice is largely
unassailable. It remains just as applicable to the “great
powers” as to presumptively less powerful actors.
Indeed, regarding future US foreign policy obligations,
nothing could be more readily apparent or ominously prophetic.
There is more.
At the beginning of his time in office, former President
Donald Trump’s “everyone for himself”
view of the world was revealed by his national security
advisor, H.R. McMaster. Expressed in a Wall Street Journal
Op-Ed piece dated June 3, 2017, General McMaster declared:
“President Trump has a clear-eyed outlook that the
world is not a `global community,’ but an arena where
nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and
compete for advantage.” For additional emphasis, the
cliché-captivated general added naively: “Rather
than deny this elemental nature of international affairs,
we embrace it.”
But exactly
what was being “embraced?” It all sounded reasonable,
of course, but it also made no intellectual or historical
sense. Even under a more stable and less dissembling American
president, Trump’s supposedly
“realistic” view of the world now remains significantly
unmodified.
Responding to
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the United States
has thrust itself into an ever-expanding nuclear arms race
without any theory-based conception of a successful “endgame.”
Though Vladimir Putin’s crimes ought certainly not
go unpunished, the result of accelerating tit-for-tat operations
in both Moscow and Washington can only be further military
escalations and (ultimately) uncontrollable world system
breakdowns.
Real history,
as we may learn from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, is the
“sum total of individual souls seeking some form of
redemption.” Recognizable expressions of any broader
human search for security can be detected in the self-centric
legal ideals of sovereignty and self-determination. The
oft celebrated “self” in these ideals, however,
refers to entire peoples, and not to individual human beings.
This self-actualization references perpetually conflicting
states, collectivities that are preparing not for coexistence,
but for recurrent war and genocide.
If real history
continues to be ignored, the lamentable result can only
be yet another measureless orgy of mass killing, one dutifully
sanitized (per earlier simplifying determinations of retired
US General H.R. McMaster) as “realistic.”
For Americans,
it’s finally time to think seriously. Immediately,
world-system context must be more fully understood and intelligently
acknowledged. Always-primal human beings, divided into thousands
of hostile “tribes” (almost two hundred of which
are called “states”) still find it temptingly
correct to slay “others.”
What about “empathy?”
Normally, amid such self-destroying human populations, this
capacity is reserved for some of those within one’s
own “tribe.” Moreover, this reservation holds
true whether relevant tribal loyalties are based on geography,
nationality, ideology or religious faith.
It follows,
inter alia, that any deliberate expansion of empathy
to include “outsiders” represents a distinctly
necessary condition of global progress, and that without
such an expansion our species will remain fiercely dedicated
to policies of nationalistic predation. How shall we best
proceed? What should be done in the extant American union
to encourage expanding empathy and more caring feelings
between “tribes”? Reciprocally, we should inquire
further: How can we improve the state of our world to best
ensure a more viable fate for the beleaguered American commonwealth?
For the United
States, these are difficult intellectual questions, challenging
queries that will demand conclusive victories of “mind
over mind,” not just ones of “mind over matter.”
At some point,
the essential expansion of empathy for the many could become
dreadful, improving human community, but only at the expense
of private sanity. And this could quickly prove to be an
intolerable expense. We humans, after all, were “designed”
with very particular boundaries of permissible feeling.
Were it otherwise, a more extended range of compassion toward
others could bring about total emotional collapse and derivatively
collective disintegrations.
Always, humankind
must confront a strange and self-contradictory kind of understanding.
This potent confrontation suggests that a widening circle
of human compassion represents both an indispensable prerequisite
to civilizational survival and an inevitable source of private
anguish.
There is more.
Sometimes, truth can emerge only through paradox. According
to certain ancient Jewish traditions, the world rests upon
thirty-six just men – the Lamed-Vov. For them, the
overall spectacle of the world is grievously combative and
endlessly insufferable.
But is there
anything useful to be learned from this parable about the
state of a nation and the state of the world?
What if these
two conditions are intersecting or even synergistic? In
the latter case, a specific subset of the former, the “whole”
of any outcome is actually greater than the sum of its “parts.”
There are many
conceivable meanings to this elucidating Jewish tradition,
but one is expressly relevant to struggles between “America
First” and “World Civilization.” A whole
world of just men and women is plainly impossible. Ordinary
individuals could never bear to suffer the boundless torments
of other human beings beyond a narrow circle of identifiable
kin. It is precisely for them, the legend continues, that
God created the Lamed-Vov.
What are the
core lessons here? Empathy on a grander scale, however necessary
in principle, must also include a prescription for individual
despair. What happens then? How shall humankind reconcile
two utterly indispensable but mutually destructive obligations?
It’s a
fundamental question that can no longer be ignored.
To arrive at
a meaningful answer, greater analytic specificity will be
needed. What happens next regarding the increasingly fragile
American union? What exactly should be done? How shall interacting
nations deal with a requirement for global civilization
that is both essential and unbearable?
Once made aware
that empathy for the many is a precondition of any more
decent world civilization, what can best create such necessary
human feeling without occasioning intolerable pain?
For certain,
clarifying answers to such a starkly complex question can
never be found amid the “unspeakable lies” of
political oratory. They can be discovered only in the resolute
detachment of individual human beings from their crudely
competitive “tribes.” Recalling French philosopher
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, any more perfect society, whether
national or international, must stem from a carefully-calculated
replacement of civilization with “planetization.”
Furthermore, any such redemptive replacement would need
to be premised upon an inextinguishable global solidarity,
that is, on a carefully designated order of planetary “oneness.”
Going forward,
individual flesh and blood human beings and not their cumulative
nation-states, should become the primary focus of national
and global reform. Without such a rudimentary transformational
focus, there could be no long term human future for planet
earth. In turn, this vitally gainful replacement would depend
upon certain prior affirmations of self, most urgently regarding
steadily expanding acceptance of a universal sacredness.
There is more,
Such short-sighted American policies as former US President
Donald J. Trump’s “America First” should
never disregard the human rights of persons who live in
other countries. In more precisely legal terms, the former
president’s blatantly neglected human rights imperative
was not just a matter of volitional cooperation or acceptable
choice. It represented an integral requirement of a US domestic
law, one that had already long-incorporated variously binding
norms of international law.
For those casual
doubters of “incorporation” who remain politically
committed to contrived bifurcations of US law and international
law, they can learn what is necessary by examining Article
6 of the US Constitution. This “Supremacy Clause”
mandates adaptations of authoritative treaty law. These
obligatory adaptations are plain and unambiguous.
Overall, Americans
should finally understand that the state of their domestic
union can never be any better than the state of their wider
world. To act pragmatically upon this core understanding,
an American president must first wittingly range far beyond
any traditionally “realistic” orientations to
world politics. To competent logicians and scientists, these
simplifying orientations are obviously fallacious. More
specifically, as easily determinable errors of logical reasoning,
they represent evident examples of an argumentum ad
bacculum.
“America
First” was a colossal mistake, one that continues
to disadvantage the United States. The state of the American
union should never have been fashioned or articulated apart
from much broader considerations of planetary security and
survival. These considerations, in turn, have been drawn
from the authoritative law of nations (international law)
into US law. In the revealing words of William Blackstone,
whose Commentaries on the Law of England reflect the most
basic foundations of US jurisprudence: “Each state
is expected, perpetually, to aid and enforce the law of
nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate
punishment upon the offenses against that universal law.”
