[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Moral Equivalent of Empire

[Bill Totten]

by Jonathan Schell

Harper's Magazine Notebook (February 2008)


The nuclear age has entered its seventh decade. If it were a person, it
would be thinking about retirement. But historical periods, unlike human
lives, have no fixed limit, and the nuclear age just now is showing
youthful vigor. In Tehran, Pyongyang, and Islamabad, among many other
capitals, very much including the Washington of George Bush and the
Moscow of Vladimir Putin, new forms of nuclear peril, like peat fires
that burn underground and then reappear in unexpected places, are
springing up. The nuclear threat is back. To understand how this has
happened and to decide what we might do about it, we must place current
events in the larger context of the long nuclear story.

Since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has had a strange
career. At first, it was simply forgotten, apparently in the profoundly
misguided belief that the Cold War and the nuclear threat had been one
and the same, and that the end of one meant the end of the other. This
turning point in international affairs marked the fourth time that the
question of the fundamental purpose of having a nuclear arsenal had been
placed before the United States. On each of the previous occasions, a
clear answer had been found.

In the beginning was the fear that someone else would get there first.
When Franklin Roosevelt ordered work on the atomic bomb in 1939, Nazi
Germany was believed to have the scientific resources to build nuclear
arms, and the aim was to defend against that eventuality. When Germany
approached defeat, the targeting shifted half a world away to Japan,
which was rightly believed to have no prospect of developing a nuclear
capability. Targeted on Japan, the bomb could be used only as a
first-strike weapon. Within the US government, the retargeting occurred
smoothly, with little recorded discussion; but for the scientists in the
labs of the Manhattan Project, there was consternation. Many of them
were refugees from countries occupied by Hitler, and their belief that
they were heading off a possible Nazi nuclear monopoly had served to
trump serious moral objections they had about building such a terrible
weapon. Almost all of them nevertheless suppressed their qualms and
stuck to their work. Similarly, when the Soviet Union replaced defeated
Japan as the target of our weapons, the transition was not undertaken
lightly or without reflection. During 1946, when John Hersey's Hiroshima
and other writings on the bomb's effects were published, the crushing
moral weight and existential dread imposed by this instrument of
unlimited and indiscriminate destruction received a considerable airing.
American officials acknowledged that civilization, even the continued
existence of human beings, was at stake. To justify such a risk to
humanity, they felt required to invoke an immense balancing of political
and moral stakes - the survival of the United States, of freedom
worldwide, the superiority of being "dead" over being "red".

Such was the background of the issues faced by the United States when
the Soviet Union liquidated itself, and, for a fourth time in the
nuclear age, the question of what nuclear weapons were for was put on
the table. But now the silence fell. The Clinton Administration
announced a "detargeting" agreement with Boris Yeltsin's Russia, but it
was no more than a smoke screen, as the weapons could be retargeted in
hours or minutes. Yet no new target was announced. The United States
faced what Senator Sam Nunn called a "threat blank". In the bowels of
the Pentagon, some spoke of a counterproliferation role for nuclear
weapons, but such a goal could not even in theory justify arsenals of
many thousands of warheads, which entered a sort of policy-free zone.
During the Cold War, a sprawling intellectual edifice, centering on the
deterrence doctrine, had been built up to justify nuclear arsenals and
their use. Nothing of the kind emerged in the post- Cold War era.

A few former officials, including the former commander of STRATCOM,
General Lee Butler, and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
asked the question why, if the political reasons for having nuclear
weapons had disappeared, the weapons themselves should not be
eliminated, but their voices were drowned in the silence.

Unfortunately if unsurprisingly, this inattention did not extend to
other countries. The governments of India, Pakistan, Iran, and North
Korea, among many others, were fully aware that the Cold War nuclear
powers had tacitly decided to hold on to huge arsenals in the post- Cold
War period. Forced to decide whether, in such a world, to remain without
nuclear weapons or to acquire them - whether to stay in the second class
of nations or to break into the privileged circle - they made the latter
choice. In 1998, India conducted five tests and declared itself a
nuclear power; Pakistan followed suit two weeks later. Iran and North
Korea, among other countries, stepped up their nuclear programs. An age
of renewed nuclear proliferation was under way.


Thus things remained, more or less, until just after September 11 2001,
when George W. Bush launched a full-scale revolution in the nation's
nuclear policies. He gave an answer to the basic questions that had gone
unasked since the early 1990s: What were nuclear weapons for? Who, if
anyone, should possess them, who should not, and who should decide which
was to be which, and make the decision stick? Bush's answers were
simple, bold, clear, and pursued with tenacity. The United States and
its allies would possess nuclear weapons, and others - especially "rogue
states" - would not. The United States alone would enforce the rules in
this double-standard world, and would do so with the application of
overwhelming military force, including nuclear force. The threat blank
and the policy vacuum were now at an abrupt end. For better or worse,
the United States was at last in possession of a comprehensive nuclear
policy.

It marked a radical departure not only from the deterrence policies of
the Cold War but also from the nonproliferation policies of all earlier
administrations, which had relied solely on diplomatic agreements to
rein in proliferation. The triumph of that policy had been the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, under which, even today, nearly 200 nations
agree to voluntarily forgo nuclear weapons.

The new dispensation, correctly called "imperial" by its champions as
well as by its detractors, was set forth in an array of speeches and
official documents in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In a series
of concentric rings racing outward like a shock wave from the site of
the fallen World Trade Center towers, the Bush policies quickly
encompassed the whole globe. The first ring was formed by the phrase
"war on terror". The word "war" meant that the stupendous machinery of
the American military would be summoned into action, and the generic
word "terror" guaranteed that the war would be global. The second
concentric ring was the addition of states that supported terrorists to
the list of enemies. But it was the third ring, Bush's discovery of an
"axis of evil" consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, that
incorporated nuclear policy as a subdepartment of the war on terror.
What allegedly united those nations was their desire to possess nuclear
and other weapons of mass destruction. Using the classical language of
great-power ultimatums, the president declared, "The United States of
America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten
us with the world's most destructive weapons". It followed naturally
that the wars must be preventive. The first consequence was the invasion
of Iraq.

Today, almost five years later, this policy is manifestly in ruins.
Proliferation has not been checked; it has gained new force and breadth.
Existing arsenals still provoke proliferation, and vice versa. North
Korea is a fledgling nuclear power, and Pakistan is in the midst of a
deep political crisis, raising fears that its nuclear weapons could fall
into the hands of Islamic extremists. The mirage of a smoking
gun/mushroom cloud in Iraq lured the United States into a disaster that
has acquired a dangerous and unpredictable life of its own. Military
dominance of the globe by an imperial United States, whether aimed at
counter-proliferation or anything else, is a vanished dream. Meanwhile,
there are signs of renewed confrontation between the old Cold War
nuclear powers, where, after all, the mother lode of nuclear danger
still lies. Russia and the United States are sparring over missile
defenses that the United State proposes to deploy in Eastern Europe.
Putin has likened the Bush Administration to "a madman running around
with a razor", and has threatened to withdraw from nuclear arms-control
agreements made during the Cold War.


Comprehensive errors of the kind displayed by Bush's nuclear policies
are, however, rarely gratuitous. Almost always, they are at least in
part misbegotten solutions to a problem that is real. Let us give the
Bush Administration its due. It framed an audacious, comprehensive
doctrine to address the problem of nuclear proliferation and acted
resolutely on the basis of its beliefs. A plan for global dominance was
a solution on the proper scale, for the problem was and is in its very
nature global: The universal pretensions of global empire matched the
universal availability of the bomb. A solution that required a virtual
revolution in the way the world was run was a solution at the proper
depth, for the problem cannot be addressed without structural change in
the international order.

Moreover, the Bush doctrine was governed by a logic that was consistent,
even necessary, if its key assumptions were accepted: First, that in a
time when the worst technologies are on the edge of falling into the
hands of the worst people and regimes (and they are) , an unmanaged
world is no longer acceptable; second, that we live in a world in which
power in the last analysis is based on force (an assumption that events
have thrown into serious doubt); and, third, that the United States
possessed greater force than all other countries combined. The
conclusions followed: If force was the ultimate arbiter of proliferation
as of other matters, then it was true that preemption would be
necessary, since action after the fact would either be deterred by the
proliferator's arsenal or lead to nuclear war. If preemption was
necessary, then regime change had to follow, since a regime that had
made nuclear weapons could build them again if it were left in power and
waited out the storm. If preemption and regime change were necessary,
then a global master capable of performing these tasks was required, not
only for its own sake but for the sake of all peoples. If the need for a
global master was accepted, then the United States, owing to its
unmatched military might, was the only available one in sight, and,
whether eagerly or reluctantly, must assume the burden. Finally, if the
United States was to perform this service, its hands should not be tied
by the rules governing others, for then it would be unable to perform
its assigned role.

The magnitude of this administration's mistakes, you might say, gives us
the measure of the problem. For notwithstanding the travesties of fact
and judgment involved in the Iraq war and elsewhere, the idea of a
global master, once duly recognized, was, at least theoretically,
adequate to the administration's stated goals. As every
political-science major knows, dominance has been one of the very few
remedies for anarchy on offer. Since what threatens today is the worst
of all imaginable sorts of anarchy, the nuclear kind (with the other
weapons of mass destruction thrown in for good measure), this
traditional solution at least recognizes the problem for what it is. The
classic text on the subject is Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, his name for a
state that puts an end to the horrifying war of all against all by
concentrating the means of violence in its own hands and bringing all
rebels and rogues to heel. Peace in this scheme was not a casualty of
dominance but the product of it. From early modern times down to the
present, these tenets have been embodied in the concept of sovereignty,
which rests on the idea that in every political system there must be a
single, unified power whose decisions are final because it possesses a
monopoly on the means of force. (The proponents of absolutism, then as
now, have never lacked cogent arguments. )

With remarkable consistency, the Bush doctrine proposed this logic for
our time. In this thinking, the idea of global dominance is to today's
world what the idea of national sovereignty was to the time of the
foundation of nation-states. It would amount to a system of something
like Earth-rule by one nation. In a very real sense, Bush was proposing
the United States as a benign global Leviathan. (His unprecedented
assertion of presidential powers at home, under the doctrine of the
"unitary executive", would make the president a kind of sovereign over
the United States as well.) In such a system, a double standard, in
regard to nuclear weapons and much else, is not a flaw but a first
principle and a necessity, as all consistent absolutists know. Whether
in the context of nation-state formation half a millennium ago or of
international order today, as large a gap as possible in both rights and
power between the lord and the vassals is essential, for it is precisely
on this inequality that the system, promising law and order for all,
relies. If there is no double standard, there will be no dominance; and
if there is no dominance, there will be no peace; and if there is no
peace, there will be nuclear anarchy; and if there is nuclear anarchy,
there will be nuclear war. And is it wrong to suggest that today, in a
widening sphere, the business of the world, going far beyond the
management of nuclear danger, must be dealt with on a global basis or
not at all? And if the dominance of a single power is to be rejected,
has any serious alternative been recommended?

In the early modern age, an alternative to dominance was proffered at
the national level. It was the conception of the state based on law and
the will of the people embodied in the long tradition of democratic
consent. It took root in England, in the Glorious Revolution of 1689,
and was developed further in the hands of the American revolutionaries
of 1776 and the Constitution builders of 1787. In responding to the
universal danger posed by nuclear proliferation, the United States
therefore had two suitably universalist traditions that it might have
drawn on, one based on consent and law, the other based on force. Bush
chose force. It was the wrong choice. It increased the nuclear danger it
was meant to prevent. It engendered pointless - and unsuccessful - war
and destruction. It set back democracy at home and abroad. It degraded
the United States, and disgraced it in the eyes of the world. It
launched the world on a vicious, escalating cycle of violence that could
not succeed yet could not, as long as the doctrine was pursued, be
abandoned. It collided head-on with the deep-seated conviction of
peoples everywhere who, whatever else they may want, are firmly resolved
not to bend the knee to any imperial master.

Yet to invoke the tradition of consent and law is not to name a solution
to the nuclear dilemma, for obviously none yet has been initiated. Bush
has been taken to task for the stubborn willfulness of his leadership as
well as for the ambition and audacity of his doctrine, but those
qualities are to his credit. They correspond to the immensity and
urgency of the task at hand. In this respect, Bush is a model. If such
is not granted, the ruin he has brought will not be repaired - it can
only be compounded, though possibly at a slower pace. It will be of no
use to revive the tepid measures, vacillating and half-hearted, of the
Clinton years, which created the vacuum that Bush so disastrously filled
with his imperial doctrine. The deeper tragedy of our times is that no
comparable ambition, no comparable audacity, no comparable will, has
been mustered by the exponents of the tradition of consent and law. On
the contrary, they fearfully offer only half a loaf of their
prescription, or, worse, watered-down Bushism, or something in between.
Their failing has been as great as his, and more contemptible, since
they are the guardians of the path that in all likelihood alone offers
hope for delivery from the multiplying perils of our day.


What might that path be? The enterprise lying within the tradition of
consent and law that, by meeting the needs of the hour in their full
sweep and urgency, must take the place of the misconceived project of
American empire can be only one thing, the measure recommended by Butler
and McNamara but not acted on at the end of the Cold War: the
elimination of nuclear weapons. This, indeed, is the proposal made by a
new quartet of former statesmen, former Secretary of State George P
Shultz, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of
Defense William J Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn, who, in an article
in The Wall Steet Journal, have called for a "world free of nuclear
weapons". To paraphrase William James, nuclear abolition is the moral
equivalent of empire. Like all equivalents, it has similarities with
what it would replace. Like global empire, abolition is universal. Like
empire, it decisively changes the structure of the international order.
Above all, like empire, it would constitute, if realized, a
comprehensive solution to the problem it addresses, which is the
mounting nuclear danger of our time.

_____

Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation
Institute. He is the author of, among many other books, The Fate of the
Earth (1982) and, most recently, The Seventh Decade (2007), from which
many of the ideas in this essay are drawn.

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