The Great Crossing: From Competition to “Cooperatism”

A generation ago South Africa looked into twin abysses: becoming a nuclear weapons state, and race war. Looking into the heart of darkness that lay at the bottom of these separate abysses, they chose the common sense route of dismantling their nuclear weapons. Under the visionary leadership of Nelson Mandela, they also dismantled apartheid. This history is relevant because in 2024 the world is staring into its own two abysses: the growing potentiality of nuclear war and the worsening climate emergency. 

 

In terms of where we choose to put our resources and creativity, these two abysses are really one. The “great powers” who possess nuclear weapons are the same countries whose constituents are responsible for the majority of carbon dioxide emissions. But they have not addressed either issue on the Mandela level of vision and determination. Nor have they begun to think about the intimate relationship between the two crises. 

 

Instead, a vain competition for military superiority continues unabated. Looking into that abyss yields a no-win scenario in which “deterrence” keeps us secure—until it doesn’t. Even setting aside nuclear weapons, the suffering of modern wars falls overwhelmingly on civilian populations—in Ukraine, in Palestine and Israel, in Sudan. “Victory” has become a phantom. 

 

Climate change, which deserves an international response along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s all-out domestic effort to lead the U.S. out of the Great Depression of 1929, remains mired in competitive values similar to those animating international military competition. Fly over any large city at night, and the jeweled sea of lights twinkling from office high-rises shows our complacency in the face of the climate challenge. 

 

The sun beats down ever more hotly on the throngs of men, many of them young, chanting slogans of revenge in Israel or Iran or Lebanon as they carry aloft the wrapped bodies killed in their endless tit-for-tat conflicts. Whether in Tehran or Tel-Aviv, rising temperatures will bring challenges in the Middle East at least as difficult to resolve as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

In a world where we can be blown up at any second, deterrence is a polite euphemism for revenge on the nuclear level. All the many activists who seek to make nuclear weapons and power illegal--the Rotarians who want to build international networks of friendship, the doctors warning of the horrific effects of nuclear war, the ecological visionaries researching new ways of producing energy, the nonviolent resisters heading to jails and prisons—these are the realists, not the mandarins of Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas whose profits are built upon the deterrence house of cards.

 

The paranoia of the competitive worldview paralyzes the decisions of officials as they drain their treasuries to pay for nuclear upgrades. The only force strong enough to begin to transform this fixation is a dual realization: (one) we are fighting wars with no positive outcome, and (two) the struggle to achieve cooperation to sustain our life-support-system can become the “good war.” 

 

On the level of values, the paired challenges come down to a race between competition and what might be called “coöperatism.”  Coöperatism combines into one the challenge of getting along with each other and the challenge of stewarding and nourishing the ecosystem which supports us—referencing a familiar ethic common to the world’s major religions: the Golden Rule. The Jewish version is one of the clearest: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others.” That formulation throws the utility of revenge, either by crude Hamas rockets or sophisticated ICBMs, into the dustbin of irrelevance.

 

The personal workout for us as individuals is to adjust our thinking to the reality that everything has changed. An enlarged, enlightened sense of self-interest emerges from realizing that everything I do or don’t do affects everyone else and vice-versa, everywhere. When it sinks in that our fates are not separate, we start to act differently, even if only in small ways. And those small ways can add up. A culture which values personal forgiveness more, for example, might lead us to a national policy of apology. What unexpected effect might it have on the Middle East if the U.S. apologized for its unethical coup in 1953 that deposed Iran’s democratically elected head and installed the dictatorial Shah?

 

At the end of his final book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud advanced the possibility of a new upwelling of Eros that might counter the nihilistic death-force which he witnessed in the Jewish Holocaust and we perceive in the horror of the October 7 attack on Israel, Israel's disproportional slaughter in response, and in the 14,000 nuclear weapons that exist in the world, many on hair-trigger. By Eros Freud meant love in the broadest sense, whatever includes anything positive and constructive. One name for that “erotic,” creative force is the good will of coöperatism. Whatever we call it, may it flourish in our hearts, our deeds—and, for those of us who have the privilege, our votes.

Beyond Conventional Joy

The politics of joy? I’m all for it! Happy warriors? Bring ‘em on! Walz? Send me in, coach! Gun safety laws as freedom from getting shot? A powerful recasting of the issue!

 

Meanwhile, in a phantasmagoric hell-hole called Gaza, the mass civilian gore produced by endless numbers of two thousand-pound bombs ensures that another generation of Palestinian youth will grow up hating Jews.

 

At the risk of being even more a skunk at the garden party, one also cannot ignore the story that President Biden has secretly reconceived nuclear strategy to adjust to the potential military cooperation of Russia, China, and North Korea.

 

Israel’s overwhelming military might did not deter Hamas from its October 7 horror show. Netanyahu has done exactly what Sinwar hoped and planned he would.

 

On both the conventional and the nuclear level, for the same reasons, neither deterrence nor war itself works. War is not working in Ukraine. War is not working in Gaza. War is not working in Sudan. In every case it is innocent civilians who endure the bulk of the suffering.

 

How can Israel respond more creatively to the bevy of existential threats it faces? How can the world prevent the existential threat of a nuclear catastrophe?

 

Our diplomats assert that China is not interested in arms control talks and is busy enlarging its nuclear stockpile toward parity with the U.S. Given Putin’s brutal aggression in Ukraine, communication that might prevent misinterpretation of routine military exercises has virtually shut down.

 

The contradictions are insupportable. We worry that a frustrated and paranoid Putin has threatened to use battlefield nuclear weapons to gain advantage in Ukraine, while we ourselves have such weapons by the thousands at the ready. Even if we don’t threaten to use them, the threat is implicit and indicates an odd double standard: my nuclear weapons are good and yours are not.

 

Our nuclear deterrence system ensures that it doesn’t matter how infinitely more decent and commonsensical Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz are than Mr. Trump. Should the moment come when some human or computer error leads to a breakdown of the system, even a strategic genius would be unable to think clearly about what to do in the fifteen minutes before, say, a rogue nuclear missile obliterates Washington. The only way to win is not to play.

 

Netanyahu has been offered alliances with regional partners that will enhance Israel’s security and isolate those who would be satisfied only with Israel’s extinction. The prevention of all-out war that Blinken and friends are trying to accomplish in the Middle East applies to the larger global stage. America does have the option of unilateral moves that could lessen tensions globally.

 

An easy unilateral move the U.S. could take has been suggested by ex-Secretary of Defense William Perry: retire our entire fleet of land-based intercontinental missiles. That would reduce, rather than intensify, the mutual paranoia that could lead to deterrence breakdown and war.

 

Just as Netanyahu needs to get over the idea that only ruthlessness will cow his enemies, we need to get over the idea that anything we do to reduce the threat of our own nuclear weapons would be seen as appeasement, misunderstood by Russia and China as weakness. They know as well as we that the games of nuclear chicken the great powers insist on playing lead nowhere except mutual suicide. Every leader, whether of a democracy or an autocracy, shares a common interest in not wanting to be incinerated.

 

Who knows whether unilaterally reducing our warheads, might render our two arch-adversaries more amenable to arms control talks? Of course the present tensions with both Russia and China make arms control initiatives a heavy lift, but we have no choice but to keep trying.

 

The world needs to turn its resources away from the black hole of militarism toward fighting the real war, the war against the climate emergency. Another positive unilateral move: become the first nuclear power to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 

If we elect Harris and Walz, they have the opportunity to evolve beyond the reflexively hawkish establishment thinking represented by presidents like Obama and Biden—decent leaders with a tragic sense of the necessity of having more bombs than our adversaries, as if that constituted real strength. That “realist” worldview offers no clear path toward what the vast majority of the world’s people want—to go forward beyond the nuclear age and even beyond war itself. Imagine the joy if that ever happened.

 

What is a Crime?

As another anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki passes and the survivors dwindle down, have we come any closer to moving beyond the nuclear age? No we have not. The risk of these weapons being used again against civilians is greater than ever.

 

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller gave a speech in 2011 where he asserted that organized crime had become international, fluid, and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Presumably the folks about whom Mueller was speaking, people who, even if powerful enough to evade justice, are still subject to laws that are on the books in at least some countries. They just haven’t been caught—yet.

 But what about the kinds of crimes which are not subject to law because they are the ultimate enforcers of the law, crimes woven seamlessly into the established ways we conduct our affairs and a crucial responsibility for government officials?

 

 First among equals are the nuclear weapons of the nine nuclear-armed nations. We abhor and condemn the Jewish Holocaust. But those nations each have far more weapons than they need not only to perpetrate a holocaust in under an hour, but such weapons also devastate the ecosystem for decades with radioactive inundation and fallout. If that isn’t a crime, what is?

Establishment thinking assumes we must keep the weapons on hair-trigger alert so that no one else would dare to use similar weapons against us. But the possibility of misinterpretation or mutual paranoia makes it almost inevitable that they will be used. It doesn’t work to prevent a crime with a crime.

We must try to resolve the wrenching paradox we have been living with since 1945: the ultimate weapon of the military establishment we passively support with our taxes and honor with our parades and holidays is always minutes away from perpetrating the worst crime in history. 

 

As many peace activists have repeated as nauseam, it is time to cross over from thinking that rape or bombing innocent civilians are war crimes to thinking of war itself as a crime.

 

What has to change for that to happen? The way we think.

 

In the Middle East, the impulse to revenge, more appropriate to playground fights, is conflated with the need to maintain or reestablish deterrence. Everyone, Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas etc. is experiencing the utter unworkability of this merging of deterrence with revenge as they draw ever closer to regional war, the exact opposite of what their citizens want. The implacable hatred of Israel’s Netanyahu and the Hamas leader Sinwar for each other, leading nowhere, is a perfect demonstration of the obsolescence of war as a means of accomplishing anything other than mutual devastation.

 

But the same conflation of deterrence and revenge happens on the nuclear level also. If, or we might say when, nuclear deterrence breaks down, the whole system is carefully arranged to enact a horrible and pointless revenge. Launch on warning is revenge and deterrence all in one. To call this is crazy is an understatement. But if I try withholding a portion of my taxes in protest, my government simply garnishes my bank account and the machine runs smoothly onward toward Armageddon.

 

So we’re left with people power, vote power, peaceful protest power, and the power of education to change minds and eventually to change institutions.

The impulse to outlaw war (it was tried in the 1920s with the Kellogg-Briand pact, still nominally in force) may seem both idealistic and futile, but as the potential for further use of a nuclear weapon on civilians grows in hot spots like Ukraine, it is worth every possible human effort to figure out how international enforcement of all war might become doable. We have to try because the alternative is unthinkable.

 

The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is now in force, a living testament to world opinion that these weapons are criminal, even if none of the nine nuclear have signed. 

 

The real war is the war to sustain the global environment. Wars always divide us. But the war to slow climate change has the power to unite us in a planetary level of cooperation for the good of all. Let’s build agreement that wars, no matter who starts them, and nuclear weapons, no matter who threatens to use them, are evil, stupid, and dysfunctional—criminal.