“The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself` is false and against nature.”- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959)
If history has any pride of place, human “oneness” must be considered axiomatic. Yet, with a US president who demands “America First,” such consideration could remain visionary. For both the United States and the wider world, seemingly indissoluble attachments to belligerent nationalism portend catastrophe on every level. In our age of expected nuclear encounters, such unprecedented failures could quickly become existential.
There are many clarifying particulars. U.S. President Donald J. Trump did not invent the illogical dichotomies of world politics. Still, variously unhidden trajectories of his leadership are self-defiling for individuals and states. Lacking any purposeful concepts of international relations and international law, these trajectories rest on the perpetually false mantra of “everyone for himself.”
These are not the abstract particulars of academic or legal philosophy. Ipso facto, a tangible question now needs to be raised: “ What should be done about misdirected Trump foreign policies that portend multiplying spasms of war, terrorism and genocide?” Without a willing rejection of “everyone for himself” thinking in Washington and elsewhere, this planet will be left with a “struggle for existence” that is not “just” Darwinian, but is also destined to fail.
The substantive issues are unhidden. In these nuclear times – times that are unique or sui generis – zero-sum orientations to national security could never be gainful. In the final analysis, recalling French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this “built to fail” destiny looms large because American national security postures remain “false and against nature.”
History could be instructive, but only if it was first studied and then taken seriously. By definition, Donald J. Trump’s “America First” misfires on all pertinent “cylinders.” Because his all-against-all orientation is driven by gratuitous rancor and dissembling acrimony, it foreshadows more than singular policy losses.
In certain worst-case but still easily-imagined scenarios, new wars could become nuclear because of variously confusing and multi-layered conflicts and/or because of a bewildered US president’s decisional errors. As timely example, a once-distant prospect has become concerning on account of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Trump’s de facto support of Putin crimes. On an especially worrisome level, the American president could even be partially controlled by his Russian counterpart. According to Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, president of Portugal, “The supreme leader of the world’s largest superpower is objectively a Soviet or Russian asset.”
There is more. US national security distinctions should always be understood in their proper analytic context. From the mid-seventeenth century to the current historical moment – that is, during the continuously unraveling period that dates back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – an adversarial “state system” has produced neither peace or justice. To wit, there is nothing on any foreseeable intellectual horizon that points to promising national or world-system transformations.
Even now, after millennia of more-or-less orchestrated human barbarisms, declining civilizations cling shamelessly to the “unspeakable lies” of politics. In this connection, decision-makers should bear in mind, civilizational decline is reconcilable with accumulations of personal wealth, rapidly advancing technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). In a literal flash, momentary military miscalculations in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Islamabad or Pyongyang could override the apparent “progress” of centuries. Among other things, this conclusion is compelling because of (1) a steadily-advancing “world order” led by Russia, China, India, and North Korea et. al.; (2) a reasonably predictable nuclear weapons program in South Korea and/or Iran; (3) a tinderbox Middle East with possible nuclear ambitions by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey; and (4) persistent rivalry between nuclear India and nuclear Pakistan.
What about decisional rationality and irrationality? Often, individuals fail to act in their own interests, an observation made as forcefully by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground) as by diligent scholars of diplomatic history and international law. To be sure, “everyone for himself” foundations of global anarchy are not about to disappear, and the continuing lack of world-system governance would represent an unsuitable context for planetary survival. Though still generally unacknowledged, realpolitik or power politics proves its own insubstantiality.
Always.
As a single state in world politics – and as a “powerful” player among almost 200 manifestly unequal states – the US is anything but immune from planet-wide vulnerabilities. Significantly, this sobering conclusion about global peace and justice is unassailable. It remains especially applicable to “great powers.”
Regarding specific US foreign policy obligations, no conclusion could be more apparent or prophetic. Though Donald Trump’s “America First” may sound reasonable on its face, its underlying arguments make no intellectual, scientific or policy sense.
None at all.
History, as we may learn from Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, is the “sum total of individual souls seeking some form of redemption.” Recognizable expressions of any broader human search for security can be detected in the self-centric legal ideals of sovereignty and self-determination. But the oft-celebrated “self” in these ideals refers to entire peoples, not to individual human beings. Conspicuously, it references perpetually-conflicting states, juristic collectivities that are preparing not for planetary peace and coexistence, but for war, terrorism and genocide.
For Americans, it’s high time to think seriously about “America First” and planetary survival. Accordingly, world-system dynamics will need to be more fully understood and purposefully acknowledged. Among always-primal human beings, billions of Jungian “souls” who remain divided among hostile “tribes,” too-many still find it exhilarating to slay “others.”
What about “empathy?” Normally, amid self-destroying human populations, this capacity is reserved for those within one’s own “tribe.” Moreover, this lethal reservation holds true whether national or sub-national loyalties are based on geography, nationality, ideology or religious faith.
There is more. Any deliberate expansions of empathy to include “outsiders” would represent a necessary condition of global progress and express a sentiment indispensable to overcoming nationalistic predations.With this in mind, how should scholars and policy-makers best proceed? What should be done in the American nation to encourage empathy between “ tribes”?
Scholars and presidents may inquire further: “ How can we improve the state of our world to ensure a more welcome fate for the Trump-imperiled American commonwealth?”For the United States, these are fundamentally intellectual questions, queries that will demand conclusive victories of “mind over mind,” not “mind over matter.”
Always, for science-based assessment, logical arguments should be followed to the end. At some point, the essential expansion of empathy for the many could become dreadful, improving human community at the margins, but only at the expense of private sanity. All-too-quickly, this expense could become intolerable. Isn’t it obvious that we humans were “designed” with rigid boundaries of permissible feeling? Were it otherwise, a more extended range of compassion toward others could bring about the emotional collapse of individuals en masse and the coinciding disintegration of nation-states.
There is a core dilemma. Seeking a more empathetic world order, humankind would of necessity confront a self-contradictory kind of understanding: A widening circle of human compassion is both a prerequisite to civilizational survival and a source of private anguish.
Sometimes, truth can emerge only through paradox. According to certain ancient Jewish traditions, the world rests upon thirty-six just men – the Lamed-Vov. For them, the overall spectacle of the world is endlessly combative and wholly insufferable. Nonetheless, there is something useful to be learned from this parable about the state of a single nation and the state of the world.
Inquiry should begin with questions. What if these two conditions were intersecting or synergistic? In the latter case, a specific subset of the former, the “whole” of any outcome must be greater than the sum of its constituent “parts.”
There are many meanings to the elucidating Jewish tradition of the Lamed Vov, but one is expressly relevant to the contradictions between “America First” and planetary survival. A whole world of just men and women is plainly impossible. Ordinary individuals could never bear to suffer the boundless torments of other human beings beyond a narrow circle of identifiable kin. It is precisely for them, Jewish legend continues, that God created the Lamed-Vov.
But what are the clarifying lessons? Empathy on a grander scale, however necessary in principle, must include prescriptions for individual despair. What happens then? How shall humankind reconcile two indispensable but mutually destructive obligations? It’s a rudimentary question that can no longer be ignored or subsumed by a steeply pedestrian national politics.
There is more. Helpful answers to such complex question could never be found amid the poet Roethke’s “unspeakable lies” of political oratory. They could be discovered only in the resolute detachment of individual human beings from their crudely competitive “tribes.” Recalling French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, any more perfect society, whether national or international, should stem from a carefully-calculated replacement of civilization with “planetization.” Any such redemptive replacement would need to be premised upon an inextinguishable global solidarity, that is, on a carefully designated order of planetary “oneness.”
Going forward, individual flesh and blood human beings, not their coalescing nation-states, should become the primary focus of national and global reform. Without such a transformational focus, there could be no long term human future for this endangered planet. In turn, such gainful replacement would depend upon certain prior affirmations of self, most urgently, ones urging acceptance of “World First.”
By law, national and international, foreign policies favored by Donald J. Trump ought never to disregard the human rights of persons who live in other countries. In more precisely legal terms, this president’s openly-declared neglect of human rights across the world is not a volitional matter or one of his personal choice. Rather, it represents an integral requirement of a US domestic law, one that has long-incorporated binding norms of both natural law and international law.
For casual doubters of “incorporation” who stay committed to contrived bifurcations of US law and international law, they could learn something of importance by examining Article 6 of the US Constitution. This “Supremacy Clause” mandates adaptations of authoritative treaty law. These obligatory adaptations are unambiguous.
Overall, Americans should finally understand that the livable status of their domestic union can never be better than the decipherable status of the wider world. To act pragmatically upon this central understanding, an American president will need to range beyond any traditionally-“realistic” orientations to world politics. To competent logicians and scientists, these simplifying orientations will be fallacious prima facie. More specifically,as flagrant errors of logical reasoning, they will represent examples of the argumentum ad bacculum.
“America First” remains a colossal mistake, one that could sorely disadvantage the United States. In principle, at least, the state of the American union should never have been fashioned apart from broader considerations of planetary security and survival. These considerations are drawn from incorporating the law of nations (international law) into US law. In the still-authoritative words of William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Law of England reflect basic foundations of US jurisprudence: “Each state is expected, perpetually, to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon the offenses against that universal law.”
There could be no more reasonable expectation. Recalling French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to ignore it would be “false and against nature.” US President Donald Trump’s “America First” represents a primal threat to human survival at national and international levels. Ipso facto, it should be more openly challenged and courageously opposed.