Getting to Know Us: A Memo to U.S. Adversaries

 

One of the first things you need to know about us is how difficult it is for us to tolerate ambiguity—especially when untangling our own motives. An example was our second invasion of Iraq. After 9-11 we felt an itch to retaliate against a clear enemy. Because we could not pinpoint one, we scratched the itch by inventing a false enemy— conveniently, one with lots of oil under its sand—and going to war against it, to no one’s great benefit.

That endeavor revealed a lot about us at this moment in our history, though similar themes can be found in our past.  We have been all too certain, like some of you, that we are exceptional, that wrongs done to us justify our flouting international law, and that violent military force is the way to get our way. Though we are a young country, much of our story is steeped in hyper-violence: our treatment of native peoples, the horrors of the slave trade, the callous use of napalm on Asian civilians. Though we are not alone in our chauvinism, we Americans don’t care to look at the dark side of our own intentions and deeds: our interference in the domestic affairs of Iran in the 1950s, our casual and pervasive brutality during a long and pointless war in Vietnam, the lies that led us into Iraq, the gradual drift into torture, and now extra-legal assassination by drone.

Though we are a country that has been quite successful tolerating and even celebrating ethnic and religious diversity within our borders, we are also endowed with an ongoing racist strain which manifests in deep fears of the “other,” fears so deep some of us indulged in paranoid fantasies about our first black president being Muslim. But even that very smart president has been sucked into our majority paranoia: that the only way we can really ensure our nation’s safety is to dominate the entire earth, including below the seas and above the air.

Our recent history involves a lot of the tail wagging the dog. Our enviable prosperity is based in an addiction to the sale of arms, weapons that tend to get used and kill people that we don’t believe are quite as real as we are. It is also based in our addiction to oil, which distorts our policies toward nations rich in that diminishing resource. We may support an Arab Spring for some, but oil-rich dictatorships with terrible human rights records, like Saudi Arabia, get a pass. Phalanxes of our generals assume that the best way to advance through the ranks is to chalk up some successful combat experience. You have learned that it does not take all that much to set this juggernaut moving against you, because a subtle bias toward unnecessary war comes built into our economy, our culture, and our politics.

Those politics are corrupted by powerful lobbies that make it dangerous to voice self-critical positions. Many American citizens, and not a few Israelis for that matter, share your unease with the Israeli government’s settlement policy, the not so subtle attempt to permanently change the “facts on the ground” in the Palestinian territories.  The cycle of violence in the region assures that extremes on either side demonize each other, delaying the inevitable compromises that are the only alternative to another holocaust, this time a nuclear one. The settlements have become emblematic of enemy stereotyping between the multiple worlds of Islam and the “West,” ratcheting up global tensions around who has nuclear weapons and who does not.

The reality that ought to inform this discussion is the fact that if only a small fraction of anyone’s nuclear weapons are detonated, the entire planet could be plunged into nuclear winter, rendering worldwide agriculture inoperable for a decade—the starting point for realizing that all war has now become obsolete as a way to resolve our many conflicts.

On some level we know how much more good the obscene sums we have spent on projects like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could do if they were reallocated to directly meeting human needs for education, for medicine, for clean water, for decent jobs. Because these are in such short supply in your world, some few of you are driven helplessly toward a violence that rationalizes the “collateral” killing of innocent civilians—just as we make similar uneasy moral compromises in the use of drones in a futile cycle of revenge. Our equivalent to your suicide bombers are not only the drones, but the hundreds of our soldiers who commit suicide because they cannot live with what war has done to their hearts and minds.

Before he was shot down at another violent moment of our history, our martyr Martin Luther King Jr. had begun to talk about the relationship between our wars abroad and our inequities at home. But his solution was as radical as any extremist’s: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” The tactics of non-violence are the secret strength with which not only our own country can overcome its contradictions and hypocrisies, but the quickest way, in the long run, that you will gain the freedom and justice to which you aspire, without bringing the American behemoth down upon you.

When you insist on thinking of the United States as Satan incarnate, bear in mind that Dr. King is a representative American consecrated with his own holiday, and millions of us still carry his torch of hope. His non-violence shows the way out of the echo chamber of fear that entraps much of the planet—whether the callously dominating violence of the modern superpower or the desperate helpless reaction of the terrorist.  Lasting change will come from neither of these extremes. It will come when we, we the human species, begin to fully address the adversaries we all share—climate instability, nuclear winter, world-traveling diseases—which make our adversarial differences pale to nothing.

All War is Civil War

Everyone has a stake in issues like the prevention of nuclear war, and indeed of conventional war, like the potential war between Israel and Iran or the U.S. and Iran, wars that would only delay, but not resolve, conflicts that portend nuclear confrontation down the time-stream. It’s hard not to have an interest in the present troubling rightward swing in Israeli politics (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick) because it shows a hardening of differences between Israel and the Palestinians over Jewish settlements, a “local” conflict with regional and global relevance.

As an ordinary citizen, I’ve never studied international relations or participated in negotiations, but I’ve met a few diplomats. I once had a conversation with a man who had served the U.S. in an African country. I was astonished at his crude and unapologetic bigotry. It was very difficult to imagine this person making a good-faith effort to understand the interests and cultural frames of reference of his assigned country. Later I had the opportunity to get to know Robert White, Carter’s ambassador to El Salvador, who was as judicious and thoughtful as my earlier acquaintance had been patronizingly colonialist.

Another thoughtful figure I got to know in the 1980s, John Mack, was not a diplomat but a psychiatrist with a passion for exploring the thought-processes of diplomats or generals trying to represent their countries’ interests. Dr. Mack won a Pulitzer for his brilliant biography of T.E. Lawrence, the British soldier who tried to influence events in the Middle East during World War I using his extraordinary comprehension of Arab language and culture.

Mack argued in a later paper written in response to the horrors of 9-11 (http://johnemackinstitute.org/Deeper_Causes_2003_06_IONS.pdf) that it was crucial in the nuclear age that we understand the motives of the “other,” in contrast to President Bush’s simplistic formulations, such as “they hate us for our freedom.” In the years since 9-11, Mack’s orientation has only grown more important, and ought to be a requirement of any diplomat’s training.  A brief excerpt from his paper gets to the heart of the matter:

The dualistic mind is not by nature self-reflective and, inasmuch as it attributes good to its own motives and actions, it will find the opposite of good in the other.

Negative or aggressive ideas and feelings that are not consistent with self-regard must be pushed away, or projected outward and attributed to the enemy. A vulnerable and frightened public can all too easily be enrolled into this dangerous way of thinking. Psychologists, social scientists, spiritual leaders, and political professionals (as well as government and other institutional leaders who understand this basic truth) have a responsibility to do whatever they can in speaking and writing to change the public conversation so that the role of one’s own group in the creation of political conflict can be acknowledged and examined, and new possibilities brought forth to create a genuine global community. . .

Then we can begin to look at how the mind deals with differences, and is prone to the creation of enemies, especially when our very existence appears to be threatened. Then we can begin to look beyond mere tolerance to true knowing of the other. Only the mind that has recognized and integrated and transcended its primitive dualistic habits can begin to identify with the suffering and rage of geographically distant people. Only then can we see the aggression and ignorance that underlies our dominance and neglect, and perceive our own role in the creation of victims far from our own shores.

When U.S. diplomats sit down with their Iranian or Israeli or other counterparts, do they set a context for discussion based in this depth of mutuality, or in dualistic alienation? Either a nuclear war that no one can win will occur somewhere ahead, or all parties will build on their mutual interest that such a no-win does not occur. This shared knowledge of stark choices precedes trust. Trust in fact can only be built out of this context, because it is the common reality for all seven billion of us. In this sense, international relations based upon deception and threat, from whatever corner, have become oddly empty, obsolete, and irrelevant. More relevant is the kind of diplomacy that actively seeks to strengthen the security (the real security of nourishing food, clean water, and meaningful work, not the pseudo-security that comes who possesses the most arms) of adversaries in the certain knowledge that only what strengthens everyone’s security strengthens our own.

Four foundational understandings that give ‘”enemies” something to talk about with each other: First, even a relatively small nuclear exchange could lead to the well-known phenomenon of “nuclear winter,” affecting not just the parties in conflict but everyone else on the planet. Second, environmental challenges posed not just by nuclear winter but also by climate change and vast systems of pollution in the ocean, soil and air make it impossible not to acknowledge shared survival and security goals that have no military solution. Third, the people across the table are as real as we are. Our own survival and theirs are interdependent, however much we disagree.  Fourth, parties to any negotiation of conflict on earth share everything even if we forget it in moments of heat. We share the big transnational challenges, and we share limbic brains that, when threatened, revert quickly to default settings of “us-and-them.”  But it helps us stay human with each other if we acknowledge that reality.

How refreshing if the next revelation of secret Wikileaks cables showed that diplomats understood the real context of their country’s self-interest: we’re all in this together.

Maya

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Maya is the name of the determined protagonist of Zero Dark Thirty who pursues Bin Laden to his death. Controversies generated by the film include whether torture was essential to the success of the mission, whether the producers were given special access to the CIA, and whether the film amounts to propaganda that excuses illegal methods of countering terrorism. Kathryn Bigelow has been accused of wanting the film to be seen as both documentary and fiction, not unlike the way Rush Limbaugh wants to be seen as both as a cultural power broker and mere entertainer.

Zero Dark Thirty, along with Ben Affleck’s film Argo, can generate some useful reflection upon American methods for achieving security in a dangerous world. Both films pander to crude stereotypes of malevolent, swarthy-skinned, bearded extremists. They intensify the “us and them” paradigm that suffuses our thinking about a region of the world going through paroxysmal changes. Argo begins with a brief montage that acknowledges the U.S. role in the creation of modern Iran: how the C.I.A. interfered in Iranian elections in the 1950s and installed the Shah, causing blowback equally as tragic as that which began with Osama being with us against the Soviets (during their Afghan War) before he was against us (leading to our Afghan War).

Argo’s reduction of Iranians to brutal thugs is countered by the supremely subtle and human Iranian 2011 film of director and writer Asghar Farhadi, A Separation, in which an Iranian couple must decide whether to move to another country to provide opportunities for their child, or stay in Iran to care for a family member with Alzheimer’s; a work vastly higher in quality than either Argo or Zero Dark Thirty. Ironic that a film of that title has the capacity to bring together Iranians and non-Iranians to share a poignant exploration of universal human themes.

The two American films celebrate our ingenuity, courage and perseverance against adversaries. But both films demand that we look more deeply into the dominant narrative that produced them. While these are “only” films, Zero Dark Thirty points us back to the painfulness of the events out of which it came, illuminating the questions: how and when can the “war on terror” come to an end, and how will we know when it does? Just as Argo points us to the question of how to prevent a war between us—or Israel—and Iran, a war that would resolve nothing.

Osama bin Laden was apparently motivated to attack “the West” out of revenge—the ancient paradigm of an eye for an eye. In an extensive 2002 letter to the American people printed in the British publication the Observer, Osama laid out his specific justifications for horrific violence against innocents.

He began by citing passages from the Koran that give permission to Islamists to fight “disbelievers.” Immediately this sets up a pathological context, because it contains what philosophers call a performative contradiction: he proclaims Islam as a universal religion, but his vision is radically exclusivist. He believed that a universal God is on the side of pure Islam against impure or non-Islamists. Sadly, not a few Christians have been known to think along similar lines.

Osama goes on to say that he and his colleagues are fighting the U.S. because the U.S. supports Israel against Palestine. He is explicitly anti-Semitic: to him the creation of Israel is a crime, implying no willingness to accept a more inclusive, multi-ethnic vision of the region’s future.

When I spoke at a Rotary club in a large city a few years ago, I said that however horrific Osama’s crimes were, it was important to hear his rationalizations and understand his frame of reference; important to consider what effect actions of our own, like stationing troops on bases in Saudi Arabia, had upon extremists; and important to bring murderers to trial as ordinary criminals rather than to exterminate them. Not all of Osama’s justifications for violence were based in irrational fantasies of revenge. He raised issues, like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq as the result of U.S. sanctions, or our double standards about whom we allow to have nuclear weapons and whom we do not, that have also been raised by patriotic and loyal Americans. A number of listeners to my talk stood up and walked out.

Our decision to assassinate Osama was not an act of restorative justice. Killing him would not have brought back to life those who perished on 9/11. It was an act of retributive, consciously decided, cold-minded payback. In the intent eyes of our heads of government as they followed the actions of the Navy Seals, eyes that included a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, it was possible to see the blindness of an eye for an eye that makes the whole world blind.

In the nuclear age, this lack of moral imagination becomes a great deal more important than the issue of how entertaining or truthful are the products of Hollywood. Our planetary misery and fear will never decrease by an endless cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. A pathological level of revenge is built into the very deterrence that rationalizes the possession of massive nuclear arsenals—the mother of all performative contradictions: a revenge-cycle that could kill us all, as it very nearly did in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Shouldn’t any sane narrative of our response to terrorism include a few less drones that create more terrorists than they kill, and a few more initiatives of reconciliation between the West and Muslim regions?  It is past time to set aside, from the trillions we spend on weapons and war, a few millions for a Department of Peace.

Otherwise we are fooling ourselves—moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. “Maya” is the Sanskrit word for illusion.

Risking Peace

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Because we are the wealthiest nation on the planet, we have the luxury of being proactive in ensuring our future security. But the path to that security looks very different from the way it did even a few years ago.

A primary example of our transformed security context is the realization that there is only one ocean of air surrounding the earth. Unless all nations make a concerted effort to convert to sources of clean energy, global mean temperatures will continue to rise and cause undesirable extremes of weather. Strategic competition between superpowers like Russia, China and the U.S. becomes irrelevant to the larger crisis of fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions from all countries. The violence of storms in my country may be intensified by the environmental policies of your country, and vice-versa. Fossil fuel corporations, more powerful than many national governments, must be pressured from taking more oil or coal out of the ground even though they have the technical means and the capital to locate and extract potential supplies. While entrenched interests are resistant to such painful change, countries like Germany are providing a model of how it can be done, having relinquished nuclear power and moved successfully toward alternatives.

Where would the capital come from for an American conversion away from fossil fuels?  How about our profligate and useless nuclear weapons renewal program? Nuclear weapons take their place as one more environmental challenge. Scientists have computer-modeled the possibility that even a small nuclear war using only a fraction of the weapons available would loft enough soot into the atmosphere to cause a worldwide shutdown of agriculture for a decade. This accelerated climate event would be as much a death sentence for the planet as all-out nuclear war between two superpowers.

Established U.S. policy assumes that deterrence needs to be maintained against the Russian nuclear arsenal—even though the cold war is a quarter century behind us. Deterrence theory also breaks down against a nuclear attack by terrorist extremists, who could simply bring a device into a country by stealth. A potent combination of obsolete deterrence strategy, the profitability of new submarines, missiles, and drones, and the assumption that no other nation is in a position to police the world rationalizes the momentum of the American weapons industry. The assumption that all our ordnance will be perpetually fail-safe is the ultimate folly. We are rushing headlong toward a cliff that makes a molehill of the “fiscal cliff.”

Conditions on the macro level are replicated at smaller scales. The massacre of children in Newtown has renewed discussion about which societal models most effectively protect the innocent. Some have suggested that safety lies in more rather than less weapons—a deterrence model similar to that which has been vainly pursued on the international level. Arming everyone to the teeth, whether individuals or nations, is a devil’s bargain yielding only greater and greater insecurity, especially given the possibility of accident or misinterpretation. It has now been a half-century since we learned where this model inevitably leads. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came within a hair’s breath of global annihilation.

Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan saw the light when they met in Reykjavik in 1986 and considered the total elimination of nuclear arsenals on both sides. The momentum of global arms manufacture rushes us past such milestones of visionary common sense into a future that, unless we risk citizen-supported change, looks increasingly foreboding. Even if the U.S. and Russia could agree to disarm to their last warhead, the planet needs to address the tensions between newer members of the nuclear club like India and Pakistan, who have yet to learn the inescapable lesson of the Cuban crisis. Perhaps the quickest way for them to learn it is by our setting an example.

The only force sufficient to counter this momentum is citizen awareness and action, building relationships across illusory divides with people in other nations on the basis of shared security concerns. The divides are illusory because all of us on the planet face the same challenges together. This reality is powerful enough to overcome the fear and enemy-imaging that has restrained global peacebuiding in the past.

Americans, who are blessed with so much in spite of our present economic woes, shouldn’t find it so hard to imagine how deeply grateful people in places like Iran would feel if we built down our nuclear weapons programs and set aside the resulting peace dividend toward a massive conversion to sustainable energy sources and meeting worldwide needs for medicine, clean water, nourishing food, and shelter.  As such initiatives came to be appreciated, terrorism would gradually die a natural death. The scarcity of resources that is expected to be the cause of future wars would be addressed preemptively. Given the greater risks of continuing on our present course, this fundamental change of direction is worth the gamble. If you agree, write your representative.

Universal Responsibility

“O that there were some virtue in my tears . . .”—Shakespeare

One of the Dalai Lama’s first principles is something he calls “universal responsibility.” However quick we are to place His Holiness on a saintly pedestal, it is only because the threshold of our own responsibility sometimes seems so very low—especially at this moment of reflection upon the massacre of the innocents in Newtown.

From a tearful President on down through the powerful talk radio demagogues to ordinary citizens, we all bear a share of responsibility for the climate of violence that is the context for the tragedy in Newton. I’m as responsible as anyone because I took too long to write my representative concerning my strong feelings about gun control. Great Britain endured 58 firearm murders in 2011, while America had 8,775. Great Britain banned handguns altogether in 1997.  

The weapons industry and the anti-control lobbyists led by the NRA certainly ought to step up to their share. They managed to chill the speech of both presidential candidates, even though the previous mass murder in Aurora, CO. took place at the height of the campaign.

Talk radio and television, with its sneering contempt for opposing views and simplistic polarization of issues upon which people of good will may differ, clouds the atmosphere of our culture with potential violence. Don’t say words alone can’t be violent, and incite to violence. It happens all the time. The obscenity is to get paid millions to pander to our most primitive fears and impulses.

It is a cliché to say that our entertainment runs on the adrenalin of violence. But there are unconscious assumptions operating that make that violence even more pernicious. The movie “Argo,” a well-crafted thriller made by a liberal-leaning director about getting seven Americans out of harm’s way in Iran, still managed to reduce all the Iranians in the film to crude swarthy stereotypes. “Zero Dark Thirty” rationalizes our government’s use of torture to find Osama bin Laden.

Our President lives and works at the center of a storm of hyper-violence.  Mr. Obama has been the subject of more violent threats to his own life than any President in history. And surely the threats to Obama’s person would only increase if he took our international policies in a more dovish direction.

No worries there. It is the commander-in-chief’s daily duty to rain down a hell of violence that, while intended to eliminate terrorists, often kills innocent children as randomly as the angel of death that just descended upon a peaceful town in Connecticut. 

Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s steely Secretary of Defense, choked up with tears of pride when he left office and was awarded the Medal of Freedom.  Years later he was brought to the realization that the campaign he helped to lead against Vietnam was a mistake of criminal proportions.  And so at last he shed more universal tears, tears that included his sadness about the waste of war and the deaths of too many innocent Vietnamese. 

It is possible to imagine that, in private, Mr. Obama sheds some tears for the broken innocents of Afghanistan and Pakistan that are the “collateral damage” of his drones.  For the time being, our political culture continues to operate in a state of radical dissociation. When our leaders shed tears equally for the deaths of children anywhere in the world, I shall, as Michelle Obama said when her husband was elected, for the first time be truly proud to be an American.

Are We Dead?

A performative contradiction arises when the propositional content of a statement contradicts the presuppositions of asserting it. An example of a performative contradiction is the statement "I am dead" because the very act of proposing it presupposes the actor is alive. Performative contradictions cannot be rationally advanced in argument. (Wikipedia)

There are performative contradictions not only in statements, but also in policies. The mother of them all is found in current nuclear weapons policy on the planet. Nuclear weapons cannot be rationally advanced in argument as an instrument of policy.

Why? Simple: computer models suggests that the detonation of a very small number of the weapons in today’s arsenals—doesn’t matter whose—would raise enough soot and ash into the atmosphere to shut down world agriculture for a decade—in effect, a death sentence for us all.

No less a pitiless realist than Henry Kissinger has stated that he tried to make foreign policy with these weapons and found it impossible. Henry Kissinger now works for abolition. 

Even a “limited” nuclear war risks planetary annihilation. A one-sided nuclear attack risks a similar fate. If India and Pakistan get into a nuclear war, we are all dead. If Israel uses a few too many of its weapons, we are dead.

Deterrence is already obsolete, in the sense that it will do nothing to stop a determined extremist from smuggling a nuclear weapon to ground zero of a target. But deterrence is infinitely more obsolete on the basis that not only is military victory impossible using these weapons, they lead only to omnicide.

So: please explain, someone, why the United States is spending hundreds of millions to renew its nuclear weapons program? Why are we not leading the charge to abolish, reciprocally and gradually with other nations by negotiation if possible, unilaterally if necessary? Unilaterally to set an example—to build trust—because we realize it is in everyone’s best interest— because there is no other logical, sane alternative.

The same goes for nations like Iran. If you are a country looking to equalize your power against other nations you perceive as mighty adversaries, why are you trying to do it with nuclear weapons?  It leads nowhere.

Are we so dead in spirit that we are numbly, helplessly going to wait for the mass physical death that will come when somebody, somewhere—and eventually they will—makes a fatal mistake?  Or can we, by non-violent means (anything else is a performative contradiction), by educating, by running candidates, by petitioning, by demonstrating, can we citizens affirm life?

I want to hear clearly the justifications of the leaders, the arguments, the case for the relationship between nuclear weapons and increased security. No citizen, to my knowledge, asked either candidate why the U.S. and Russia still have ballistic missiles targeted at each other on high alert—25 years after the end of the cold war.

That did not seem like a neutral omission; it seems more like an active symptom of psychic dysfunction.  We look down upon North Korea with pity, a nation and people in the grip of mass psychosis. Time to take the beam out of our own eye before we judge the mote in another’s.

Can we awaken from our trance? Can we admit to ourselves the radical shift that has taken place in our environment on the basis not only of nuclear weapons, but also of global climate events, where the environmental policies in one country determine the air quality in another? What does that reality do to the concept of having an “enemy”? I depend for my survival upon my “enemy.”

Conflict will continue even if there were no nuclear weapons on earth. But think of how much international paranoia is connected to actual or potential nuclear weapons. It rationalized the U.S.’s misconceived invasion of Iraq. It intensifies the enmity between Iran and Israel. It keeps hundreds of secret agencies in Washington eavesdropping on us all for ominous signs.

If the planet can emerge from this period of change and turmoil, we will look back and begin to acknowledge just how much our unconscious dread had sucked away not only our collective economic resources, but also some essential piece of our psychic vitality. No wonder there is so much fascination with zombies and vampires, the walking dead. Does their half-deadness mirror something deep within us all?

But something new and vital is germinating from our long winter of death-induced fear. As Paul Hawken has said, millions of non-governmental organizations around the world are working for common values—non-violent political structures, environmental sanity, gender equality, and universal human rights. Someday soon this collective affirmation that we are one human family will further dissolve the need for nuclear weapons—may they rust in peace.

Words for a No-Bull Inaugural

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My fellow citizens, I have just sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, but what does that mean? Our earth has become so small, national economies so interdependent, global ecological problems so transcendent of nationality, that it would be an abdication of my leadership responsibilities to pretend otherwise. A new world has dawned, and the United States must begin to honestly redefine its interests within it.

After sixty-plus years of maintaining the peace by means of our overwhelming nuclear strength, we are confronted with a series of paradoxes that cannot be resolved merely by increasing that strength—because the very meaning of “strength” has totally changed.  Even a small number of our nuclear weapons—or those of any other nation for that matter—cannot be detonated without raising enough dust and soot into the atmosphere to fatally affect world agriculture for a decade.

In addition, we must reluctantly admit that our own nuclear weapons no longer possess the deterrent effect that was intended by their triadic deployment on land, sea and air—let alone the fact that no leader can guarantee that command and control systems, either our own or those of other nuclear powers, can forever restrain their inadvertent or accidental misuse. It is past time to cooperate with our allies and as much as possible with our adversaries to create nuclear-free zones, to batten down nuclear materials so that they do not fall into the wrong hands, and to aggressively conclude new treaties for gradual reciprocal reductions of nuclear warheads around the world. We know from the Cuban Missile Crisis, now a half-century behind us, exactly where any nuclear confrontation inevitably leads, and how potential misunderstanding can push adversaries into a catastrophe that fails to resolve any conflict of interests, no matter how fundamental.

Nuclear weapons, useless for conducting rational foreign policy, must now take their place in the context of all our other ecological challenges.  I am convinced that not only have nuclear weapons forever changed our world, but also that the scientific evidence is overwhelming that the earth is undergoing serious climatic changes that we must plan for rather than further denying. While no one can state with certainty that any given weather event, any storm or tornado or hurricane, is attributable purely to human activity, trends are emerging that cannot be ignored. At least we know for certain that military superiority, nuclear or conventional, will not be able to address the unfolding economic and ecological crises that loom over us. The quality of air we breathe in our own country is dependent upon policies that the Chinese adopt to satisfy their energy demands, and vice-versa. Authentic security now means cooperating with the Chinese and others to transition toward sources of clean, sustainable energy. Competition for military or territorial advantage on land or sea has become irrelevant to this transcendent goal.

We cannot afford both to take the steps that mitigate climate instability and prevent future wars over scarce resources, and also continue to be resented, and often confronted, in our role as self-appointed world policeman. Therefore the moment has come to prudently but swiftly transition out of our strategic emphasis upon maintaining an American military presence around the world and into partnerships with other nations that address root causes. It is clear that it is infinitely less expensive to supply food, shelter, safe water drinking water, education, medicine, reproductive services and sustainable energy to the entire world than it is for the United States to try maintain global military superiority. Further, addressing human needs directly is the only long-term structural solution to terrorism.

Further, our Constitution, written with the best intentions two and a quarter centuries ago, needs, like that of Ecuador, to extend rights not only to people but to the living systems which support our own well-being. Ecuador’s citizens and leaders accept that their own health depends upon animals that have genuine rights to viable habitats and rivers that have rights to run clean within their banks. We humans cannot be any healthier than the oceans, the soil, the coral reefs, the fish and the plants that make up the common resource that sustains us. Our economic principles cannot avoid taking this reality into account as a fundamental working truth. The ecological wholeness of the earth is the only ultimate “corporation” and the final source of available capital. Any investment that fails to take into account mutual earth-human relations will inevitably become a net loss for everyone, no matter how much a privileged few seem to benefit in the short-term.

This recognition of interdependence represents an enormous shift in our conventional cultural assumptions about military strategy, economics, and international and domestic politics, but the necessity for this shift has been creeping up on us for a generation. I know full well that for many of my fellow citizens, the notion of military strength contradicting itself, or of non-human creatures having rights to life and health analogous to our own, will appear to be deeply uncomfortable, even threatening, concepts. But my task is not merely to reflect our existing state of mind, it is to help lead us all toward the light as far as we can discern it. This world, and therefore this nation, will be infinitely safer if no one has nuclear weapons than it would be if everyone had them—just as true security for all lies in an authentic ecological stewardship in which all nations participate. We can renew our own special strengths as Americans by realizing that our own self-interest is bound up in what is best for the whole. This will open up new opportunities for world leadership as we search together for creative solutions.