The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine will eventually end, but the seventeenth-century system of competitive nationalism that produces them will not — and until world leaders confront that deeper failure, the species is running out of time.
Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, world politics have been shaped by sovereignty-centered belligerence. When considered over time, especially as technologies of military destruction become more widespread and indiscriminate, this seventeenth-century system of competitive nationalism portends one overarching deficit: It is destined to fail.
What should be done, especially by the world’s “superpowers” and currently-warring states in the Middle East? It’s not “merely” an important question; arguably, it is the single most consequential query of modern times. It is also the most bewildering.
To begin, though ending the war with Iran is “Job 1,” there is a much larger task at hand. This is the obligation to replace “Westphalian” threat-system dynamics with more durable mechanisms of world legal order. Animating this core obligation must be scholars and visionary thinkers who can meaningfully understand the declaration of Italian film director Federico Fellini: “The visionary is the only realist.”
Some assertions are not controversial. If left unchallenged or simply modified by ad hoc reforms, world politics will experience increasingly catastrophic breakdowns. To continually call for yet another round of “tribal conflict” would be to reject everything we have learned thus far about law, civilization and species survival. There is no livable future in any global system that would identify durable peace with visceral threats of “obliteration.”
Some things are not complicated. Unless world leaders finally take tangible steps to implement a cooperative planetary civilization – one based on the irremediably central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all. To reject this conclusion would require leaders to accept that an inherently corrosive ethos of “everyone for himself” could somehow be “good.”
The urgency of this assessment is clarified by our species’ manifest advances in civilization-destroying technologies. Augmenting these “advances,” some major states are shifting from an essentially deterrence-based strategic doctrine to one based on strategies of nuclear war fighting. At the moment, the country that has been most open about such a shift is Pakistan, a state with variously tangible links to Iran and Saudi Arabia and a posture of intermittent warfare against India.
Important work requires diligent study. The universal dimension of human identity (“human oneness”) can be encountered in certain vital literatures and among such seminal thinkers as Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The fact that such thought is generally ignored in “real life” is bitter testimony to what little is being done to rescue an imperiled planet.
In world politics, everything begins with the individual, with the microcosm. We humans generally fear solitude or “aloneness” more than anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death. Amid the Trump-fueled chaos that is presently stampeding across entire continents, we still wittingly abide loyalty to primal claims of “tribe.” Almost everywhere, not just in the Middle East, individuals more-or-less desperate to “belong” subordinate themselves to the destructive expectations of belligerent nationalism.
More often than we might care to admit, and especially in the Middle East, such subordination carries with it an enthusiastic acceptance of “martyrdom.” Recalling the marooned English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we may be reminded here that the veneer of human civilization is razor thin. Vastly impressive scientific and medical discoveries aside, whole swaths of humankind remain fiercely dedicated to “sacrifice.” In the end, it is this atavistic dedication that lies at the heart of war, terrorism and genocide.
As a species, we remain determinedly irrational? Why? The best answer lies in our shortsighted views of “realism.” Assessed in the clarifying light of history, these views are strange and incomprehensible. Not until the twentieth century, after all, did international law even bother to criminalize aggressive war. Today, when the Russian president wages a war of aggression and genocide against Ukraine, the American president exculpates the criminal and excoriates the victim.
Hope exists, we must always affirm, but now it must sing softly, with circumspection, inconspicuously, almost sotto voce. Though counter-intuitive, especially in the United States, the time for celebrating gleaming new information technologies is at least partially over. To survive together on this “everyone for himself” planet, all should struggle to discover an individual life that is detached from “tribalism.” Only after such an elemental struggle could we seriously hope to reconstruct world politics and world order. In the end, this means a foundation of global vision and human “oneness.”
In his landmark work, The Decline of the West, first published during World War I, Oswald Spengler inquired: “Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?” This remains an indispensable query. Inter alia, a correct answer would finally acknowledge that war, terrorism and genocide can never be countered by larger missiles or threats of “obliteration.”
Our historically-tribal planet lacks a tolerable future not because we have been too slow to learn what has been taught, but because what has been taught is largely beside the point. That point is science-based human survival, not transient, contrived or inconclusive military victories. Even if the current war against Iran ends “successfully” for all of Iran’s adversaries (an inconceivable outcome prima facie), the underlying system of world politics will remain crudely rancorous and structurally unstable.
It’s time for a summation. Whether or not US President Trump succeeds in negotiating a cease-fire agreement with Iran, the result will fall short of a much larger and more important objective: The design and creation of survivable world futures. A decision to tolerate such shortfall and continue with time-dishonored searches for a “balance of power” would represent humankind’s ultimate miscalculation.
Notes
[1] See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two treaties comprise the “Peace of Westphalia.”
[2] This condition of Westphalian chaos stands in contrast to the legal assumption of solidarity between states. This customary assumption concerns a presumptively common struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known in formal jurisprudence as a jus cogens assumption, was already mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[3] In literary terms, we may think here of the warning by the High Lama in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “The storm…this storm that you talk of…It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos…The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world is a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary.”
[4] Regarding connections between US and Israeli nuclear strategies, see by this writer, Professor Louis René Beres, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy and America’s National Security, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, Tel-Aviv, December 2016. This monograph includes a special postscript by retired four-star US Army General Barry McCaffrey.
[5] In words used by the US Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana , “International law \[world legal order\] is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 184) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of \`universal violations of international law.’”).
[6] Rabbi Eleazar quoted Rabbi Hanina, who said: “Scholars build the structure of peace in the world. See: The Babylonian Talmud, Order Zera’im, Tractate Berakoth, IX.
[7] “Sometimes,” says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, “the worst does happen.”
[8] Says French thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “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.” (See The Phenomenon of Man).
[9] For informed accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy(Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order(Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[10] A practical expression of “oneness” lies in the common civilizational fight against crime. It has given rise to the principle of universal jurisdiction, and is mentioned in the Corpus Juris Civilis; Grotius, THE LAW OF WAR AND PEACE (1625), Bk. II, Ch. 20; and also in Emmerich Vattel, LE DROIT DES GENS, Bk. I, Ch. 19 (1758). The specific case for universal jurisdiction, which is strengthened whenever extradition is difficult or impossible to obtain, is also built into the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, which unambiguously impose upon the High Contracting Parties the obligation to punish certain grave breaches of their rules, regardless of where the infraction was committed or the ascertainable nationality of the alleged criminals.
[11] In this connection, noted Sigmund Freud: “Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless.” (See: Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, cited in Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10 (1973-73), p, 27.) Interestingly, Albert Einstein held very similar views. See, for example: Otto Nathan et al. eds., Einstein on Peace (New York: Schoken Books, 1960).
[12] See, by this author: Louis René Beres, University of California (Santa Barbara): https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/august-2017/fixing-microcosm-global-governance-and-world-order
[13] Says psychologist Otto Rank ( Will Therapy and Reality, 1945): “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying….”
[14] Under international law, terrorist movements are always Hostes humani generis, or “Common enemies of mankind.” See: Research in International Law: Draft Convention on Jurisdiction with Respect to Crime, 29 AM J. INT’L L. (Supp 1935) 435, 566 ( quoting King V. Marsh (1615), 3 Bulstr. 27, 81 Eng. Rep 23 (1615) (“ a pirate est Hostes humani generis”)).
[15] Under international law, the idea of a universal obligation to global solidarity is contained, inter alia, within the core principle of jus cogens or peremptory norms. In the language of pertinent Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969: “A peremptory norm of general international law….is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole, as a norm from which no derogation is permitted, and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.”
[16] For the crime of aggression under international law, see: Resolution on the Definition of Aggression, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Dec. 14, 1974. U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 UN GAOR, Supp (No. 31), 142, UN Doc A/9631 (1975) reprinted in 13 I.L.M., 710 (1974).
[17] Continues Spengler: “\`I believe,’” is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love.’” See: The Decline of the West, his Chapter on “Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell.”
[18] According to 18th century Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1758), “The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.”
[19] In law, a cease fire or armistice represents an intra-war convention, an agreement concluded between belligerents . Prima facie, such an agreement does not terminate a state of war. The 1907 Hague Convention IV Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, stipulates, at the Annex to the Convention, that “An armistice suspends military operations by mutual agreement between the belligerent parties.” (Emphasis added): See CONVENTION NO. IV RESPECTING THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR ON LAND, WITH ANNEX OF REGULATIONS. Done at The Hague, Oct. 18, 1907. Entered into force, Jan. 26, 1910. 36 Stat. 2277, T.S. No. 539, 1 Bevans 631, at Chapter V, Art. 36.) The courts of individual states have also affirmed the principle that an armistice does not end a war (See, for example, Kahn v. Anderson, Warden, United States, Supreme Court, 1921, 255, U.S. 1). Throughout history, armistices have “normally” envisaged a resumption of hostilities.
[20] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Horasis(Zurich):
https://horasis.org/a-neglected-survival-imperative-the-design-of-alternative-world-futures/
[21] The concept of a balance of power– an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is an analytic variant – has never been more than a facile metaphor. It has never had anything to do with any calculable condition of equilibrium. Because such balance is always a matter of individual subjective perceptions, adversary states can never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances are “balanced” in their favor. In consequence, as each side must perpetually fear that it will be “left behind,” the search for balance only produces ever-wider circles of disequilibrium.