“Us and Them” Is Obsolete

   

Competitiveness is one of our primary values. Competition runs the world. It orients success in business, or sports—and above all in war. Adversaries seek the transient glory of military advantage. Yet none of our four biggest challenges, the climate emergency, nuclear weapons, the rise of AI, and global pandemics are “us and them” problems. They are “us” problems. This may seem more obvious with climate change and disease, but it is just as true for AI and nukes, especially in some fatal combination of AI and nukes under theoretical consideration by the masters of war. The ruins of Gaza show us that even conventional wars can approach a nuclear level of destruction.

As AI gets further integrated with modern weaponry, it will turn into an “us” problem. Revenge, advantage-seeking and tit-for-tat among “us and them” is fueling an ever-accelerating arms race toward a no-exit level of destruction. To use AI only to help “us” overcome “them” will prove futile—there will be ever-shifting moments of temporary technological advantage such as we are seeing in the standoff in Ukraine. But not only will no one win definitively, everyone may lose. AI will be a saving grace only to the extent of what it could do for all of “us.”

If we cannot forgive, let alone love, our enemies, we can at least acknowledge the futility of the competitive cycles of violence to which we are addicted. While it is understandable that collective trauma might make the following thought experiment impossible for most Israelis, imagine that the response to the October 7 pogrom shifted 180 degrees—that Israel had been honest about how hard its leaders have worked to make sure they would never have legitimate partners on the Palestinian side. That the sickeningly labeled strategy of “mowing the grass” may even have been one of the causes of the brutal Hamas attack.

Imagine that Israel, knowing from bitter experience what it means to be the victim of dehumanization and genocide, refused to make similar victims of the Palestinians either in Gaza or the West Bank. Imagine that the resources expended by the IDF, billions of dollars, setting aside the lives of far too many on both sides, had flowed directly into the establishment of an Israeli-initiated Palestinian state with safe borders, equality under the law, subsidized land and housing and a working economy, taking the wind out of the sails of the hate-driven proxies of Iran like Hezbollah.

What is true for any intractable quarrel on our small planet is just as true for all the others. Peacebuilding has a chance when people recognize their own role in the conflict. We venerate Nelson Mandela because he sought reconciliation rather than victory. Just as Netanyahu might look into the face of the late Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar and see his own ruthlessness, so could Secretary Hegseth look at his counterpart in the Iran Revolutionary Guards and see a fanaticism resembling his own. The face of “them” is a mirror.

The feckless unnecessary war with Iran will presumably only end with some version of the very treaty that the Trump-detested Obama had already painstakingly solidified, along with a return to the status quo ante of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where the U.S. and Iran are trying absurdly to outblockade each other. In the climactic scene in “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a medical officer, after caring for his British fellow-prisoners while they spend months painstakingly building a railroad bridge, has to witness the bridge being blown up—by British commandos. “Madness! Madness!” he exclaims.

The astronauts who have viewed the whole Earth from space almost all report a transformation in their thinking, a sense that their home is no longer their nation of origin, but the planet. War is a bomb-cratered, blood-spattered, child-screaming distraction from the shift toward which the Earth-inclusive spirit of the astronauts urgently points.

In another thought experiment that seems far easier than Israelis reconciling with their many adversaries, imagine an alien attack upon Earth. How quickly would our local “us and them” disputes transform into a single “us” against the aliens. But we have been invaded by forces that have an equal capacity to unite us—the scourge of weapons of mass destruction and the threat of rising global temperatures. Our opportunity is a paradigm shift from “us and them” to “us” working together to solve challenges no nation can solve alone.

 

Naïveté

        In a tough and complex world, people tending to the left side of the political spectrum are often accused of starry-eyed naïveté when they push for the prevention of war and the building of peace through law, diplomacy and budgetary control over military forces—replacing the law of force with the force of law. The operating paradigm of the hawkish, by contrast, is peace through strength: no amount of weapons is ever enough and the glove of diplomacy only thinly covers the iron fist of force. These are caricatures, simplified to make a point.

We now have a Secretary of Defense who is himself a caricature, and the engine that motivates him is a naïveté so deep that he has been rightfully eviscerated in the media. His conception of the resolution of international conflict is tattooed on his own body.  His models of choice are Christian-Muslim wars in the Mid-East that ran for two centuries and ended about 1300. It would be more amusing if it did not lead to catastrophes like the mass slaughter of schoolchildren.

Mr. Hegseth is almost too ripe a target. But the bigger picture suggests an underexamined naïveté in establishment thinking about international relations generally. The global security regime has encouraged the strong possibility of apocalyptic scenarios which one would assume experts would try far harder to avoid, accidents waiting to happen. The first such scenario that comes to mind is that twenty-minute moment when a leader must decide how to respond to signals that one or more ballistic missiles are incoming and have gotten past any defensive measures (the plot of the powerfully understated film “House of Dynamite”). The choice becomes to do nothing, or launch in response and risk that Armageddon was based on a mistake. Isn’t there an extraordinary naïveté in the fatalist assumption that nothing can be done about this insanity? Especially when it is so clearly in every nation’s shared best interest to change it?

But this naïveté/insanity is based on the pervasive assumption of peace through strength: the weapons are ready for instant use so that they will never be used—forever. Isn’t this really as laughably naïve as Mr. Hegseth’s killing Muslims for Christ?

The truth is more ominous. Think of what’s really out there “protecting” us: thousands upon thousands of world-destroying warheads, connected to thousands of computers and early-warning sensors, connected to thousands of fallible, however well-trained, human beings.

But it’s not as if all this weaponry reinforces a balanced opposition of power. It is taking place within two rapidly changing contexts: the back-and-forth of the planet’s various conventional wars, and the perpetual motion of we build/they build technological advances (with the military use of A.I upping the instability ante.)

What could go wrong?

And yet the vast majority of the commentariat that fills our airways with opinions is fundamentally OK with our all-in-the-same-leaky-boat condition.

The naïveté of a leader like Benjamin Netanyahu may be more wily but is basically similar to Hegseth’s. Like the Secretary, Netanyahu trafficks in the familiar “either you’re with us or against us” fallacy. He uses the dual context of the Holocaust and of the October 7^th Hamas attack to give no quarter to his many adversaries and no hope to the Palestinians. To transform oneself from victim to “invincible” storm-trooper invulnerability and lay to waste, even preemptively, all perceived enemies is functionally naïve if only because it will never lead to Israeli’s security.

We live in radically new conditions. Two other Jews laid it out for us: Einstein said in 1946: “The unleashed power of  the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” And Jesus suggested a path that sounds naïve to hawks but seems more realistically imperative by the day: that we must learn to love our enemies as much as we love ourselves. Challenging as that ideal may seem, it wouldn’t be as difficult as trying to pick up the pieces after WW3.

Why “Us-and-Them” Thinking Equals Strategic Failure

Intrepid space voyagers have once again sent back photographs of the whole Earth from space, underlining our all-in-the-same-leaky-boat condition of interdependence that renders national demarcations oddly irrelevant. The detonation of anyone’s nuclear weapons would spread radioactivity across such abstract lines; likewise pandemics show equal disrespect for borders, as do rising sea-levels and ever more ferocious storms. All this is new in the human story, and our thinking has yet to catch up.

While we may have spent decades trying to transcend our limited identifications, old habits persist. It is so instinctively easy to worry more about successfully extracting a second downed American pilot from Iran than about 175 Iranian children killed by an American missile. Reflexive national chauvinism lies deep and dies hard.

As a prime example it is hard to ignore Mr. Hegseth’s holy war, take-no-prisoners approach, which represents an obsolete way of thinking going back to the Crusades. He has allowed himself to become a mirror-image of the Iranian fanatics he wants to annihilate without mercy, making no distinctions between the hard-liners and the millions of Iranian people who have no use for theocratic government. As our fresh-thinking American pope said in his Palm Sunday homily, the “King of Peace” rejects the prayers of those who wage war.

Failing to comprehend the radical implications of the view from Artemis II, we fall into unworkable contradictions. Two apparent goals of Trump’s war—to reduce Iran's ambition to possess nukes and to ensure the free flow of fossil fuels through the strait—have boomeranged against him. The president's climate denial and attachment to fossil fuels mires him in an energy paradigm which is counterproductive to everyone's interests, including the non-recoverable effects of the climate emergency.

This unnecessary war has ensured that hatred and fanaticism and the desire for revenge will further extend for decades. It repeats the mistakes and abysmal lack of both historical and cross-cultural understanding that marked our previous misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone in Central and South America. Worst of all, our “excursions” are a distraction from the real war—the war to sustain our threatened biosystem.

Change begins to happen when near-catastrophe threatens the old-paradigm thinking of establishment experts, even as outlines of better alternatives begin to emerge from those able to imagine them.

It is already clear that the brutal Iranian regime will not be bombed into submission and collapse and will be probably all the more motivated to join the nuclear club.

Which brings us back to the fundamental change on our small blue planet wrought by the invention of never-can-be-uninvented nuclear weapons. What constitutes security in our new condition? Every country a nuclear power? Or pushing toward a different security system based upon the irreducible reality that no one is safe until everyone is? Toward a system which reduces incentives to possess weapons of mass destruction?

There are no good nuclear weapons or bad nuclear weapons. They’re all bad. So when we go to war to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, we might think about gestures toward reducing our own. Paradoxically, as William Perry, the defense secretary under President Clinton, has pointed out, the U.S. would be more secure if it unilaterally eliminated its entire land-based ballistic missile system, which consists of weapons which cannot be called back in the event of a mistake. We could go further. We could begin the arms control process again with both Russia and China. Perry’s proposal might count for something against Russia’s and China’s present unwillingness to negotiate. The U.S. could commit itself in principle to acceptance that nuclear weapons cannot accomplish anything good by being the first nuclear power to sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

All inspections of imports will include an urgent need to detect a clandestine nuke. All wars from here into the future will be fought under the looming presence of these weapons. World leaders seem to sense that they cannot be used in wars. Putin could “win” with them against Ukraine. Israel and the U.S. could “win” with them against Iran. But we have restrained ourselves, at least so far, because we know the depth of loss such a “win” implies. Now the president of the U.S. is threatening the Iranians with hell. Is he implying that he might cross the nuclear threshold? That would be the ultimate strategic failure of  obsolete “us-and-them” thinking.