Schultz, Kissinger, Perry and
Nunn, those quintessentially establishment figures, have just posted in the
quintessentially establishment Wall Street Journal their fifth editorial since
2007 advocating urgent changes enabling the eventual abolition of nuclear
weapons on planet Earth.
Computer modeling tells us that
if even a small fraction of the world’s nuclear arsenals are detonated in a
war, doesn’t matter where—could be Pakistan-India, Israel-Iran, U.S.-Russia or
China or Iran—the amount of soot thrown skyward could curtail agriculture on
the planet for a decade—effectively a death sentence for all.
So why do we hesitate? Are these
weapons worth the money they are sucking away from our schools and firefighting
equipment and bridge repairs? Why are Russian and American nuclear missiles
still pointed at each other on high alert?
Working backward from the
ultimate bad outcome of a nuclear war, no matter how it started, by a terrorist
action or a misinterpretation or an accident or even a deliberate attack by one
state on another, as we contemplated nuclear winter and no food, would we still
divide the world cleanly into “goods” and “bads,” or would we realize that the
fears and tensions engendered by the weapons themselves led to a system over
which we did not exercise the preventive controls for which Kissinger/Nunn/Perry/Schultz
advocate?
We need to acknowledge how our
minds function—both the minds of the “goods” and the minds of the “bads,”
because we all possess a limbic brain, a fight or flight response that goes
back to our saurian ancestors. 9/11 paranoia led us “goods” to cross the red
line beyond which lies the immorality of torture. But all of us also have a
part of our brain that evolved later, a part that can make rational decisions based
in common survival goals. That’s the part of the brain Gorbachev and Reagan and
George Bush Sr. used to end the madness of the cold war between the U.S. and
the dissolving Soviet Union.
A few weeks ago at a Maine
conference on the Middle East, Lawrence Pope, an American career diplomat, dared
to assert some hard truths. “I would argue,” he said, “that it does matter that
there are virtually no Foreign Service officers in policy positions in the
State Department anymore, and that at the White House, it is the military
intelligence complex that reigns supreme. The Arab Awakening cries out for an
active American diplomatic role. I wish I were more optimistic about the
ability of our militarized institutions to adapt to this new world. As a
government, we are better at flying drones, recruiting agents, and indulging in
patronizing fantasies about nation-building than we are at dealing with free
men and women.”
What is missing is not only diplomatic
initiative, but something in our own hearts that can recognize free men and
women when we see them, without wishing to control them—or their oil. In the
context of nuclear paranoia, it is difficult to focus creatively upon war
preparation and upon peacebuilding at the same time. They represent two
disparate kinds of creativity. Establishment leaders assert we need both, in
the form of diplomacy backed up by overwhelming force. But as Einstein said, you cannot solve
a problem on the same level of thinking that created the problem. On the paranoid level, to a hammer
everything looks like a nail.
The work of dismantling not only
the nuclear weapons themselves, but also the enemy thinking that tempts the
primitive parts of our brains, is endless. Maybe we are the good guys and
Iran’s leaders are bad guys. But even as we become more alienated from each
other and move closer to war, we both know that war will not resolve our
differences and will only result in tragedy. The 80 million people of Iran have
little to say about it. Because we’re supposedly more democratic than Iran (though
hundreds died in the streets of Iran in 2009 demonstrating a yearning for
democracy), we ought to be able to think more outside the nuclear fears that seem
to box in our policy options.
Instead what we have is secret
violent initiatives on both sides—tit for tat. We insert a virus into their
uranium-refining centrifuges that causes the centrifuges to spin out of
control. Someone, maybe us, maybe Israeli intelligence, is assassinating their
nuclear scientists. Iran in turn arms surrogates like Hezbollah, or attacks
computers in Saudi Arabia. Fears and stereotyping intensify, in a kind of proxy
of the potential nuclear war no one can win. Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would
slow the impetus of proliferation but will not stop it. Terrible resentments
would be exacerbated in the Persian/Arab/Muslim world, with unforeseen
consequences down the time-stream.
Dialogue with adversaries should be based less on living up
to U.N. agreements (Iran is hardly the first to break those when it chooses)
than on shared realities. Nuclear winter helps us to see nuclear weapons as a
subset of planetary environmental challenges like climate change and the shared
systems of pollution in the ocean, soil and air. These make it impossible not
to acknowledge common survival and security goals that have no military solution. The people we
disagree with are as real as we are. Our own security and theirs are
interdependent, however much we despise their prejudices or clandestine
activities. We share the big transnational challenges, and we share limbic
brains that, when threatened, revert quickly to default settings of
“us-and-them.”
Our nation was founded by
Europeans who came here to transcend colonialism. Even as the Old World was
giving up its colonies, we became a country that unconsciously revived colonial
domination, rationalized by the assumption that our job is to bring democracy
to the unwashed masses, or, failing that, at least colonize their oil. We could
start by penitently acknowledging colonialist misdeeds like the oil-motivated interference
of the United States and Britain in Iran’s democratic process in the 1950s,
which we can bet Iranians have not forgotten. Doing the inner work of
recognizing our own shadow-side would allow us to access the creative
peacebuilding skills available to “free men and women” everywhere. Beyond
“us-and-them,” we face the nuclear cul-de-sac together as one human species. It
is hopeful that someone as pitilessly realistic as Henry Kissinger realizes
that there is no way out but abolition.
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