If the brutal and tragic agony of Syria today has one small glimmer
of hope, it is that the great powers are completely stymied, blocked, paralyzed
in their ability to resolve anything by military action. Were this 1914 and had
we possessed nuclear weapons, the Syrian situation might have led to a war that
ended the world.
But now we can see the old realpolitik tactics, supplying
arms to the son-of-a-bitch that we thought of as at least our son-of-a-bitch, which
never really worked anyway, completely revealed in all their emptiness. So why
is this a silver lining? Let us not oversell. The complete inability of tribes and
religious rivals to resolve their conflicts in Syria hardly bodes a future
without war. History has not ended. Potentially there are terrible conflicts ahead, especially
over scarce resources like water and arable land.
But there is a possibility that the great powers, first of
all the United States, can begin to play a different, more constructive role, a
role of war prevention. To do
that, we must begin from where we are, where we are as a planet, and reconceive
our national interest. Along with everyone else's, it is utterly connected to
and dependent upon such non-military realities as that fish stocks in the ocean
are close to exhaustion, or that the carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere
has now surpassed 400 parts per million, or that global population is expected
to continue to rise to between 11 and 17 billion people before it levels off.
These are not problems with military solutions.
In this context, the cost of the American-led wars of the
past ten years, based in a gross overreaction to terrorism combined with the misconception
that terrorism could be eliminated solely by military means, has been a
colossal lost opportunity for the U.S. Instead we could have invested much more
in making the challenging transition beyond fossil fuels, or strengthening the
food infrastructure worldwide—and we still could do that. Imagine having taken
the cost of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and spending it instead simply
giving outright decentralized solar and wind energy, medical help, and
education to people in the developing world. It is at least an even bet that this
would have been a more robust preventative of terrorism.
Looming behind our thinking about conventional military
force is the issue of nuclear war. Here again the amount of money spent for
zero increase in real security is appalling, and the emptiness in the rhetoric
of national leaders thunderously hollow. With the advent of the computer
modeling of nuclear winter back in the 1980s—that only a small percentage of
nuclear weapons detonated could cause worldwide climate change, massively
shutting down agricultural systems—the whole theory of nuclear deterrence
collapsed into dust. A remaining issue is the possibility of a terrorist entity
acquiring a nuclear weapon. The only solution to both issues is to budget not for building
or renewing weapons, but to forge treaties to reciprocally bring down the
numbers of weapons possessed by the nuclear powers—and to secure existing
nuclear materials. This includes pushing for the entire Middle East region as a
nuclear-free zone. The alternative is mass extinction, which will include the
United States.
The recent disciplining of a group of U.S. military
personnel in charge of nuclear ICBMs who had become unacceptably careless with
the strict protocols around these weapons underscores the reality that the
danger lies as much in the weapons themselves in combination with human frailty
as it does with who possesses them. The U.S. and Israel threaten Iran if it
crosses a red line, but our double standard, along with the universal bad combination
of fallible people and a world-destructive energy, is there for all to see. It
is a kind of miracle that disaster has not happened—so far.
On the nuclear level, the obsolescence of war has long been
crystal-clear, though world leaders continue to pretend otherwise. The
situation in Syria provides an instructive example of that same obsolescence on
the conventional level. It allows
any policy-maker who possesses some genuine compassion for the children there,
for everyone there, to say: we cannot help by selling arms to any one party,
because we don’t know in whose hands they will end up. We cannot help by
invading. All war is civil war. All
war is obsolete for meeting our real challenges as a human family. Therefore
the first step, the best step, even if it is only a humble beginning, is to ponder:
what else could we do that might be creative and helpful?
