—Michael Zantowsky, writing about Vaclav Havel
Something genuinely
bothers me about the U.S. negotiations with Iran, whether they are ultimately
successful or not.
There is a huge distance
between what can be realistically accomplished politically and some rarely
acknowledged truths that might allow the U.S. to go much further toward
creating a safer world. I admire the way President Obama acknowledged candidly
that Iran has had legitimate issues with the U.S., like the U.S. meddling in
Iran’s elections in 1953 and the American support of Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war
even as Saddam used chemical weapons against Iran. It’s a step toward truth,
and not a mere giving in to facile moral relativism, to acknowledge that there
are multiple frames of reference that are useful to take into account in
international relations.
In no way should Iran be
let off the hook for its virulent anti-Semitism and its own destructive
meddling by proxy. But, as Obama rightly points out, Nixon negotiated
successfully with China, just as Reagan did with Soviet Russia, the erstwhile
evil empire.
The true and almost
entirely unspoken context for negotiation between two or more sides in the
nuclear age who each see the other as untrustworthy, flawed, or devious is
epitomized by the sentence Albert Einstein wrote in a telegram to world leaders
way back in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save
our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
It is a huge assertion to
say that everything has changed. Is it true?
Even taking into account
U.S.-Russian arms reductions, there are still 17,500 nuclear weapons extant on
this small planet, distributed among nine nations. What Einstein prophesied has
come to pass in spades: the nuclear powers maintain an elaborate fiction that
their security interests are furthered by possessing a robust nuclear arsenal
and that deterrence will protect us all forever into the future. This is the
“Big Lie” that undergirds America’s anxious search for security.
The truth—the new mode of
thinking that Einstein implied is desperately needed—is that the existence of
nuclear weapons, no matter who has them, is a common, shared, transnational
challenge that, far from making anyone safer, moves everyone day by day toward
the abyss. Ordinary people seem to have a clearer grasp of this than “experts”
and politicians determined to maintain the status quo. A status quo which is
actually a gradual drift, as Einstein stated, toward catastrophe.
The assumption that
America is so technically advanced that our nuclear weapons are fail-safe must
be set against accounts in the news of the bored servicemen in the missile
silos of the Midwest cheating on
readiness tests. Should a fatal error occur and a nuclear war begin by accident,
it would be an ultimate evil that far transcends the putative good or evil of
any existing national regime—including the United States, which refuses to see
itself as anything but an exceptional force for good in the world.
A further danger of this
illusion of exceptionalism is our propensity to define ourselves by who our
enemies are (Iran tortures routinely; we do not—wait—oops!)
without examining our own government's role in the mix. Politicians who wish to
distract their constituency from domestic difficulties can find the notion of a
fearsome “other,” whether African at home or Persian abroad, all too
convenient—setting aside that it keeps the weapons industry humming. The truth
is, there is no “other.” We’re all in this together.
So perhaps what bothers
this ordinary citizen about the frenetic negotiations with Iran and the equally
frenetic opposition to them on the part of hard-liners in both countries is the
elephant in the room of a grossly hypocritical double standard. Our thousands
of nukes, Israel’s hundreds, Pakistan’s hundred or so are OK. Iran coming
anywhere near building even one—not OK.
Einstein would see this
double standard, almost 70 years beyond his pronunciation of naked truth, as
deeply illusory—a kind of planetary psychosis rooted in a now obsolete mode of
thinking, which pits nation against nation as if we were back in the time
before the world wars, when the most destructive weapon was a cannonball.
