A Speech by a President Who Really Wished to Avoid More Middle East Wars

      Good evening, my fellow Americans.

You entrusted me with your vote to represent the interests of the United States—domestic and strategic. Yet it has become an inescapable reality of the modern world that no nation, even one as powerful as ours, can achieve security in isolation. In the long run, national security depends on global security.

As you know, a few days ago Israel began a pre-emptive aerial strike on Iran. Israel is a longstanding ally and has an absolute right to defend itself. The horrific attacks of October 7, 2023 were, in their brutality and tragedy, a grim echo of our own September 11. Iran has been deeply implicated in supporting Hamas and in fueling other forms of proxy violence throughout the region.

At the same time, if we look honestly at history, our own hands are not entirely clean. Without excusing the present Iranian government—which has brutally suppressed the legitimate protests of its own citizens—we can afford to acknowledge our past. I have no hesitation in apologizing to the people of Iran for the American role in the unjust coup of 1953 that removed the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. That intervention had grave consequences that have shaped Iran’s tragic history ever since.

If I believed that a bombing campaign against Iran had any realistic chance of producing a government worthy of that nation’s ninety million citizens, I would not hesitate to use the overwhelming strength of the American military to bring it about. But decades of painful experience in the Middle East have taught us that ill-considered military intervention often produces more long-term chaos and suffering than stability.

My fellow citizens, in an age of ever more destructive weapons and an accelerating international arms race, we must search for imaginative approaches to break the endless cycle of hate, fear, blame and revenge. Saying this aloud is not weakness. It is strength—strength rooted in the simple truth that escalating violence ultimately leads in only one direction: toward mass death.

My administration will continue to pursue diplomatic conversations with Iran about limiting its pursuit of nuclear weapons. This includes renewed efforts to revive negotiations around the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement designed to slow Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons.

Many Iranians living in exile have argued that the most effective path toward change in their country lies not through bombs, but through expanding diplomatic, educational, and commercial ties—connections that gradually open societies and strengthen the voices of those who seek greater freedom and democratic participation.

Israel today lives in a dangerous neighborhood and faces real threats. Yet recent military actions, understandable as they may be in the shadow of October 7, have not ultimately increased Israel’s long-term security. A nation as strong as Israel has the capacity to choose magnanimity rather than remain trapped in an endless cycle of retaliation.

In the end Israel faces the same fundamental choice it has long confronted: either to endure an unending harvest of counter-violence, or to recognize the full humanity of the Palestinian people and their right to the same safety and security Israelis seek for themselves. This will not be easy, and the history of dehumanization on both sides runs deep. But we know with certainty that endlessly escalating violence cannot produce a positive outcome.

The international community today faces a set of challenges so complex that no single nation can solve them alone. The “us-and-them” thinking behind our current global security system contributes little toward solving those problems. Nuclear weapons do not grow food for our children, desalinate water for parched regions, or cool a planet that is steadily warming.

There are no good nuclear weapons and bad nuclear weapons. As President Ronald Reagan once said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Computer models suggest that fewer than a hundred nuclear detonations over major cities could send enough smoke into the atmosphere to plunge the planet into years of freezing temperatures—nuclear winter. This possibility hangs over the fruitless competition among the major powers to achieve parity in numbers of warheads.

If we expect other nations to reconsider their reliance on nuclear weapons, we must also be willing to reconsider our own.

Decades ago former Secretary of Defense William Perry proposed a bold step: eliminating the United States’ entire land-based system of ballistic missiles. Secretary Perry argued that doing so would actually increase the long-term security of the United States. Our deterrent would remain fully intact through our strategic bombers and our undetectable submarine fleet. Land-based ballistic missiles are uniquely destabilizing. They must be launched quickly in moments of crisis. They can be launched by mistake. And once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. Even if they reached their targets, there would be no victory for anyone.

Perry’s proposal is an idea whose time has come. As Commander-in-Chief, I am directing the implementation of a plan to demobilize the United States’ land-based ballistic missile force.

This initiative has several purposes. It sends a signal that the nuclear arms race is leading humanity nowhere. It reassures non-nuclear states that their security does not require joining the nuclear club. And it invites other major powers—notably China and Russia—to join us in taking their own meaningful steps back from the brink.

Our world remains complex, dangerous, and filled with conflict. The professionalism and strength of American military forces will forever be available to defend our nation and protect the innocent from harm. Yet their greatest service may be that their strength can help create the time and space for diplomacy that solidifies a rules-based international order—allowing all nations to turn from war toward working together on global issues like the climate emergency.

God bless our troops, and God bless the United States of America.

The Courage to Survive

 

In his dense and challenging lectures gathered into a book called “The Courage To Be,” the late theologian Paul Tillich sorted our modern anxieties into three existential buckets: first, the anxiety of fate and death, experienced as dread; second, the anxiety of guilt and self-condemnation, that we have failed to become what we ought to be; and third, the anxiety of meaninglessness, where we feel nothing we do could make a difference. Tillich was talking about the individual, but these work also on the collective level.

 

His triple definition of our deepest fears comes to mind as the last arms control treaty between Russia and the United States expires. Putin offered to extend it for a year; Trump said no. The U.S. is concerned about having enough weapons to deter China and Russia at the same time. Establishment talking heads solemnly opine that deterrence requires a response (ie., we need to increase the number of our warheads) to China’s present buildup so that the charade of our tottering assumptions about security can be maintained.

 

Which brings us directly to Tillich’s varieties of angst, all three of which coat with a thick paralyzing sludge the insane assumptions of nuclear deterrence. We assume nine nuclear powers can go on forever without making a fatal mistake. We assume that 900 nuclear weapons make us more secure than 600 nuclear weapons, and if another country has 1200 nuclear weapons, we cannot be secure unless we can field 1600.  We build; they build. The masters of war achieve prosperous quarterly returns as the Union of Concerned Scientists keeps moving the Doomsday clock closer to zero.

Meanwhile computers that model nuclear winter tell us that less than a hundred detonations over large cities would condemn the planet to a decade of freezing. At least that would result in one less mega-crisis—no more climate emergency from global warming—yet somehow that thought does not decrease dread.

The second Tillich anxiety, in the form of our collective guilt and self-condemnation, needs the air and sunshine of open dialogue, instead of being pushed into shadowy recesses of denial. The international community has known for eighty years that nuclear proliferation leads only to less and less security and more and more danger, greater confusion, increased probability of error. Average citizens, busy with making a living, let themselves off the hook, leaving it to the experts to ensure disaster will not occur. But some of us do feel uneasy that our tax dollars continue to prop up the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction.

It is challenging to maintain the courage to be, to bear the guilt and introspection that leads to responsible action—to say, no one can do everything, but everyone, including helpless little me, can do something.

Tillich thought the third anxiety was the most dangerous of all: the anxiety of meaninglessness and paralysis. We don’t get the impression that the diplomats of the great powers have searching conversations about alternatives. Are they saying to each other “We may have different political and cultural systems, but we have a huge shared interest in survival. How can we cooperate more effectively to ensure that all of us can survive?” They and their apologists in the think tanks want to continue the absurdity that deterrence, however tragic, is the only reasonable alternative. If they do not look for new possibilities, they will never find them. That is despairing helplessness—and a grievous failure of ethical imagination. To condemn ourselves to mass suicide is not worthy of our high destiny as descendants of a 13.85 billion year process.

We find ourselves in the midst of a world that is dying and a world yet to be born. One sign of a dying world is that the leaders of nuclear powers have only minutes to decide the fate of the Earth once they receive indications that missiles are incoming. This bug in the system is not a bug, but an unavoidable feature of deterrence—so egregiously nutty that we just put up with its dysfunction and hope for the best—ie. that it never comes to that. In another example, Putin knows he cannot “win” with nuclear weapons. Instead he falls back upon conventional bombs to destroy power stations, cruelly freezing the stalwart Ukrainians into capitulation. But Putin also knows that however territory is redistributed, no one will emerge victorious. There will be only be suffering, loss, and an immense unquenchable resentment.

In the world that waits to be born, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has gone into force, though none of the nine nuclear powers have signed on. That treaty expresses a response on the part of billions of people around the world to Tillich’s three anxieties. Billions dread mass death. Billions, however submerged their awareness of it, yearn to be relieved of collective guilt for a holocaust that would dwarf the Jewish Shoah. Billions want to make a difference in favor of life.