Our political culture becomes surreal when one views it like
an alien from another galaxy homing in for an overview. The third presidential debate was meant
to examine differences in approach to foreign policy. Like everyone I have a genuine
investment in the character of the person upon whose desk sits a telephone wired
directly to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. In the event, there were few differences between Governor
Romney and President Obama, because polarization works like a vise upon
creativity. No one can risk thinking aloud outside the box.
What neither candidate could say, because it would cost them
the election, is that rational foreign policy cannot be conducted with nuclear
weapons (Kissinger so stated in no uncertain terms once he was out of office). Nor
could Romney and Obama admit that the meaning of security in the nuclear age
has utterly changed. Nor could they admit that it may be impossible to keep
nuclear weapons entirely in the hands of the “good guys,” and out of the hands
of the “bad guys.” Nor that deterrence in the age of terrorism has become
obsolete. Nor that the “nuclear winter” that would ensue from even a “regional”
nuclear war, say between India and Pakistan, could shut down agriculture
worldwide—in essence, omnicide. Nor that global climate change is a challenge
that requires a level of cooperation between nations that renders all arms
races, conventional or nuclear, irrelevant.
Instead, in order to acquire votes, our leaders mouth pieties
about Israel or Iran and refrain from discussing human-caused global warming,. A
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize must ratify his cojones by extra-judicial killings of Osama bin Laden and other
leaders of Al-Quaeda—when proper criminal trials might have been a light to the
world.
The human species is a couple of millennia beyond the
so-called Axial Age, when the wisdom of religious geniuses like Jesus and the
Buddha ripened and began to spread the notion of radical interdependence as
expressed in the various forms of the Golden Rule. And still we do not see the
all-too-practical point in the age of climate instability and world-destroying
weapons of loving our enemies.
Fifty years beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis, seventy-three
years beyond Auden’s writing “we must love one another or die,” we know that a nuclear
arms race leads only to catastrophe. I may not feel love for Ahmadinejad
or Netanyahu. But at least I can see with a compassionate eye the karmic
causation of history that informs their complementary paranoia. Germany,
crushed by vengeful terms of surrender after World War One, became vulnerable
to Hitler’s demagoguery and attempts to wipe out the Jews, leading to the need
to create a Jewish homeland, which in turn resulted in a state partially
occupying the lands of others, eliciting the enmity of the Persian/Arab world
(Auden, same poem: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”). Ahmadinejad’s
perspective is informed by the fact that the U.S., Israel’s knee-jerk ally, messed
with Iranian politics in the 1950s, tilted toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war,
and dispatched, perhaps with Israel’s help, a computer virus to sabotage Iran’s
uranium enrichment centrifuges.
What nations have to do together, faced with no alternative
but mass death, is collaborate on the
basis of the common survival goals of the millions of citizens whose lives are
at stake. “Collaborate” is a word with severe negative
connotations—collaborators were shot after World War Two. French women who had
fraternized with German soldiers were forcibly shorn of hair. But what is
intended here by the word “collaborate” is the highest form of conflict
resolution for the good of the whole, on the basis of Auden’s truth, the truth
of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the truth that we can only solve our climate
challenges together.
Were I president, far from saying as Governor Romney did
that sitting down with the likes of Ahmadinejad showed weakness, I
would be on a plane to Tehran so fast it would make Mitch McConnell’s head
spin. I would acknowledge our past meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. I would
try to be an honest broker across the Israeli-Palestinian divide—for Israeli’s
sake as well as Palestine. I would admit that we’re deeply apprehensive about
where the nuclear arms race could lead, that we know cyberwar can work both
ways and probably already has, and that we have to break the cycle and find a
way where everybody wins, whether that might be a nuclear-free zone in the
Middle East, or even better, Earth-wide.
Our presumed security sits shakily atop a house of nuclear
cards, where one misinterpretation within the command-and-control systems of India
or Pakistan or Israel or the U.S. or Russia or France or China, could lay waste
all that we love. From the perspective of the stars, who is the “enemy”? Is it
not the awesome destructive power of these weapons, our stubborn insistence on
obsolete notions of national pride, war itself? If an alien were looking down
upon us she would shake her head in perplexity, raise a delicate tentacle to her
puckered brow, and blink her six eyes in astonishment. Her strangeness would be
nothing next to our own.
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