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.
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