Assessing Big History at a Time of Global Crisis
A Skeptical Premise
I find myself fascinated by the explorations and exposition of Big History, helpful for a deeper, more vibrant metanarrative of self-understanding. And yet I also find it fundamentally irrelevant, and even delusional, when it comes to addressing meaningfully what is agreed to be a historical condition of unprecedented global crisis threatening near-term civilizational and ecological viability, imperiling even the survival of living species, including the human. Putting my skepticism in its simplest form, “we do not have time” to make Big History work in favor of a livable future, and it serves as an indulgent distraction as so presented. That is not to say that Big History may not have immediate pedagogic benefits by enriching education, allowing students and readers of all ages to grasp better how the profound predicaments of the present came about and what might be done to reach a more elevated stage of human evolution. The mistake of Big History advocates is to suppose that transformational thinking by a few people even if situated on a geo-civilizational terrain will have a sufficient impact to exert an emergent influence on a policy level within time horizons relevant to meeting the fundamental concerns associated with climate change, weaponry of mass destruction, corporate plunder, destructive forms of inequality, political extremism, mass alienation, conspiratorial myth-making, and transnational crime.
David Christian attaches great historical weight to the reaction of the astronauts who conveyed back home the images of Planet Earth as seen from the moon, regarding as a Big History event in real time that imparted lasting meaning to how we act as humans on a shared planet, inspiring a sense of oneness that will facilitate a transition from conflict to cooperation as the dominant pattern of collective behavior. In Christian’s words, “Whatever form it takes, a more expansive and interdisciplinary perspective on today’s world can galvanize the Great Transition by reorienting the thinking, attitudes, and motivations of billions of people.” Perhaps it is doing so. It has been more than fifty years since Neil Armstrong sent his famous message from the moon: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Putting to one side the discrediting reliance on patriarchal language, the dysfunctional behavior patterns of earthlings has gotten worse since that hopeful view was articulated. The material structures of wealth and power, state-centric world order, annual military expenditures (including of heavy investments in the militarization of space) exceeding by multiples the devotion of resources to achieve a cooperative approach to global-scale problem-solving. Leadership in political and economic domains continues to be assessed by short-term performance seen as beneficial to distinct nations, while most corporate behavior continues to exhibit scant concern for the worsening threats directed at the future of humanity.
Transforming the War Mentality
Big History, by its focus on underlying patterns and deep structures of evolution, is turning away from the challenges of immediacy and overlooking the resilience of geopolitical ambitions that manifest themselves through conflictual behavior that continues to dominate the political imaginaries of those running the world, as well as supportive elites who benefit from existing circumstances and bureaucrats who manage the structures of governance at every level of social interaction. Big History esoterically marginalizes or renders as harmless geological, cosmic, or evolutionary abstraction the dismaying reality that the most impressive cooperative behavior on the planet are taken against rivals or enemies, often framed as an alliance, and preoccupied with the preparation for and conduct of warfare. It is only after the carnage produced by the world wars of the past century that cooperation for peace by way of international law and institutionalized multilateralism (UN) gained prominence on the policy agenda of world leaders.
It may seem irreverent to conclude that science fiction writers are more relevant explorers of human nature and plausible alternative ways of living together as a species, than are the leading lights of Big History. Sci-fi imaginatively explores the idea that the most effective way to gain planetary unity and the ultra-cooperative problem-solving capabilities that are needed, would be to invent a belligerent planetary neighbor in the galaxy allegedly gearing up for an aggressive war against Planet Earth. Putting in a good word for “conspiracy theorists,” even if such a scenario of a galactic neighbor intent on planetary aggression was entirely made up, if widely disseminated and believed by “the right people,” it could create a political atmosphere conducive to the emergence of a widespread willingness to cooperate against a common enemy perceived as a dire threat to the whole world. Such a fictitious account of reality draws on the competence and experience of the leading intelligence agencies in the world and the main media platforms to spread such a great white lie.
The Quest for Hope in a Dark Time
In the background of this speculation is the implicit recognition that the war template is so deeply embodied in the political and cultural psyche of humanity as itself to provide ironically the only ready-made exit from catastrophic future being generated by the unsustainable and abusive ways that humans were living on the earth. Unlike postwar escalations of cooperative behavior, looming ecological disasters may become irreversible tragedies long prior to their systemic damage.
In other words, even when we look at emergent signs of transformed modes of behavior that is indispensable if humanity is to act on behalf of Great Transition visions, the future looks bleak, but I would argue not as bleak as the future conceived from the perspective of Big History. These more entrenched, emergent liberating paths of behavior are more resonant with human experience, and can plausibly be converted into political projects with some traction if activist segments of civil society can be enlisted in this struggle for the material and spiritual future of humanity. Such action would still involve an epistemological humility about the future, allowing the realities of radical uncertainty to create space for what I have called “a politics of impossibility,” which rests on struggling for a cooperative and just future by confronting militarism and predatory economic behavior. Such a posture admits both that the prospect of achieving emancipatory goals cannot be discerned from the standpoint of the present, tempered by the awareness that the future is unknowable and hence uncertain, and yet there are instances throughout history where “impossible” goals were achieved. Recent examples include the struggle against South African apartheid that seemed hopeless until it wasn’t or the implosion of the Soviet Union that ended the Cold War. Both examples of essentially nonviolent struggles that created unexpected opportunities for a brighter future.
My purpose in this brief essay is in no way to question the illuminations of Big History as exemplified by the stimulating contributions to this themed discussion. What I doubt is the usefulness of such inquiries for what I understand to be the mission of the GTI, which is to be taken seriously at the level of policy as well as ideas. To do this effectively, constructive thought and scholarly endeavor have to engage directly with the urgencies currently in evidence, and do so in the spirit of the Anthropocene, which provides a grand occasion for human responsibility and opportunity.
[Prefatory Note: The post below is the text of my contribution to the April 2023 Global Forum of the Great Transition Initiative GTI as developed under the guidance of Paul Raskin at the Tellus Institute in Cambridge, MA. The monthly theme was ‘Big History,’ attracting a range of notable authors whose short essays can be found at GTI Forum. For anyone interested in a transformed future I recommend following the wide range of views and themes addressed by GTI. To achieve positive forms of change at a time of multiple converging crises imperiling the human species and its natural habitat is. the ‘crisis of crises’ facing humanity at this time.]
27 MayWar Prevention Depends on Respecting Invisible Geopolitical Fault Lines
18 May[Initiallly published In CounterPunch on April 26,2023, later substantially modified.]
If we look back on the major wars of the prior century and forward to the growing menace of a war fought with nuclear weaponry, there is one prominent gap in analysis and understanding. This gap is to my knowledge rarely acknowledged, or even discussed, by political leaders or addressed in the supposedly independent main media platforms in the West. Indeed, the gap seems to be explicitly denied, and given a hegemonic twist, by the Biden presidency, especially by Antony Blinken’s repeated insistence that American foreign policy, unlike that of its principal adversaries, is ‘rule-governed.’
At first glance ‘rule-governed’ seems to be nothing more than a concise synonym for adherence to international law. Blinken makes no such claim, and even a foreign policy hawk would have a hard time straining to rationalize American international behavior as ‘law-governed,’ but rather might say, or at least believe, following Thucydides, ‘that strong do as they will, while the weak do as they must.’ Some have speculated that ‘rule-governed’ as a phrase of choice these days in Washington is best associated with a rebirthing of ‘Pax Americana,’ or as I have previously suggested a dusting off of the Monroe Doctrine that guided U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America since 1823 to proclaim after the Soviet implosion in 1991 what is in effect a Monroe Doctrine for the world, or seen from a more Atlanticist perspective, the NATO-IZATION of the post-Cold War world.’
Such provocative labels seems descriptive of the NATO response to the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, which from day one was treated by the West as an flagrant instance of a Crime Against the Peace, more generally viewed as a war of aggression, and so declared by a large majority of countries by way of a UN General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1, 2 March, 2022, in a vote of 122-5, with 35 abstentions including China and India) although without comparable support at the UN for the follow up to denouncing the attack by way of imposing sanctions, supplying weapons, and diplomatic strong-arming looking toward a military victory rather than a political compromise achieved through a ceasefire followed by negotiations. The coercive diplomacy was left essentially to NATO members, varying according to their perceived security interests, but generally following Washington’s lead in failing to seek a ceasefire and a negotiated political compromise.
What seems to many, mostly in the West, obvious at first glance at the Ukraine War is far less clear if a closer look is taken. There is the matter of the pre-war context of Ukrainian and NATO provocations as well as the Russian right of veto entrenched in the UN Charter, amounting to a green light given to the winners in World War II to the use of international force at their discretion when it comes to peace and security issues, and in the process ignore Charter obligations to seek peaceful settlements of all international disputes.
The U.S./UK unprovoked attack on Iraq in 2003 is indicative of this double standard manifested by the contrasting international response to the Russian attack, as were the NATO regime-changing intervention in Libya and Euro-American support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and a host of other examples going back to the Vietnam War. In other words, ‘rule-governed’ as a practical matter seems to mean impunity whenever the U.S., its allies and friends, launch their ‘wars of choice,’ while reserving accountability in relation to international law for its adversaries, particularly its geopolitical rivals, who are denied the intended impunity benefits of their right of veto and held responsible for adherence to international law in the war/peace domain as it is presented in the UN Charter. In effect, international law is not a restraint on the U.S./NATO with respect to war-making, but it functions as a strategic policy and propaganda tool for use against adversaries. Such duplicity in deploying the authority of law is widely seen outside the West as a glaring example of moral hypocrisy and double standards that undermines more generally the aspiration of substituting the rule of law for force in relations between the Great Powers in the nuclear age.
These is more to this exhibition of double standards and moral hypocrisy as illustrated by another related Blinken elaboration of the kind of world order he affirms on behalf of the U.S. It is his ahistorical assertion that ‘spheres of influence’ should have been thrown into the dustbin of history after World War II, and therefore the fact that Ukraine (and Crimea) border on Russia, with long intertwined historical experience, ethnic ties, and territorial instabilities be treated as irrelevant. Surely, Cubans or Venezuelans, or earlier Chileans and certainly Central Americans, would be excused if they laughed out loud, given the forcible contemporaneous efforts of Washington to deny the populations of these countries respect for their sovereign rights, including even the inalienable right of self-determination. Spheres of influence are admittedly abusive with respect to bordering societies, whether maintained by Russia or the United States, and yet in an imperfectly governed world such spheres in certain regional settings play crucial war prevention roles. They can mitigate potential geopolitical confrontations in which deference by antagonists to previously well-delimited spheres of influence can be credited with providing a brake on escalation at times of crisis. East/West spheres of influence for preserving world peace during the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, most notably at the time of the Berlin Crises(1950s), Soviet Interventions in Eastern Europe (1956-1968), Cuban Missile Crisis (1961).
Rather than dispensing with spheres of influence the wartime leaders of the U.S., UK, and the USSR in World War II recognized even during their common cause against Naziism that an anticipated post-war rivalry between the winners to pursue their distinct national interests by extending their ideological, political, and economic influence, especially in Europe could turn dangerous. These leaders, although espousing hostile ideologies, sought agreements to avoid postwar confrontations in Europe at a series of conferences. The leaders of the U.S., USSR, and the UK reached agreements, most notably in 1945 at Yalta and Potsdam, that might have done more to prevent a slide into World War III than certainly the UN Charter and maybe even the much invoked doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD as denoting the pathology of genocidal peacemaking in the nuclear age).
These wartime agreements did not explicitly use the cynical language of spheres of influence but rather stressed the divisions relating to the occupation of European countries previously controlled by the defeated fascist states, with a particular attention given to Germany that was seen as the most culpable and dangerous actor among the Axis Powers. In this regard, alone among European states, Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, and its capital city of Berlin was notoriously divided into West Berlin and East Berlin. For the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union was given responsibility for occupation and state building in East Europe while the victors assumed a comparable responsibility in Western Europe.
This language of division did not inhibit both ‘superpowers’ from engaged in propaganda wars with one another throughout the Cold War. Yet what it did do was to induce international prudence in a form that was respectful of these wartime assessments of control. This prudence was in stark contrast to the inflammatory response of the West to the 2023 Russian attack on Ukraine, accentuated by disdaining diplomacy, a political compromise, and openly seeking the Russian defeat so as to confirm post-Cold War unipolarity when it comes to peace and security issues. Undoubtedly, the wartime atmosphere in 1944-45 contributed to the importance of taking preventive measures to guard against the recurrence of a major war fought over the control and future of Europe. The Potsdam Conference took ended less than a week before an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman informing Stalin that the U.S. possessed a super-weapon that would hasten the unconditional surrender of Japan, as indeed it did.
Although conducted prior to the use of the atomic bomb this wartime diplomacy was fearfully aware that a future war would be far more destructive than two earlier world wars. In this sense, these fault lines in Europe were established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical ambition, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished hopes of retaining postwar international harmony, thereby dimming hopes of transcending the high-risk Great Power rivalries of the past. This led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite some close calls, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.
The idea of ‘geopolitical fault lines’ and even ‘spheres of influence’ are not well established in the practice or theory of international relations, but their existence is profoundly necessary for the maintenance of peace and security among Great Powers, and for the world generally. This relevance of geopolitical fault lines is partly a result of the failure of international law to have the capability to enforce consistently limits on the coercive behavior of the reigning Great Powers, granting them de facto impunity for acting beyond the limits of the law. In this sense, geopolitical fault lines and related agreed territorial divisions offer an improvised substitute for international law by setting formally agreed mutual limits on behavior backed by the specific commitments of Great Powers, which it is known that when transgressed result severe tensions, and possibly catastrophic warfare, between the most heavily armed states in the world might result.
The overriding point is that the Biden/Blinken response to the Ukraine War and the rise of China are contemptuous of the geopolitical prudence and diplomatic techniques that helped save the world from a disastrous conflagration during the Cold War Era. Of course, costly warfare broke out in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam, but in settings where there was no assent to the temporary division imposed from without and the strategic stakes of challenging these imposed supposedly temporary divisions were peripheral as contrasted with Germany where they were of the highest order. Despite this, in the Korean and Vietnam contexts, the stakes were still high enough for the U.S. to threaten the use of nuclear weapons to maintain the status quo, most menacingly in relation to Korea, and China acting on the basis of border security entered the conflict to prevent the forcible reunification of Korea.
It goes almost out saying that geopolitical fault lines and spheres of influence are second-order restraints whose indispensability reflects the weakness of international law and the UN. Remedying these weaknesses should be accorded the highest priority by governments and peace-minded civil society activists. In the interim, spheres of influence are a recognition of multipolarity, a prelude to a more cooperative world order, and a sign that the distinctive challenges to the global public good posed by climate change and nuclear weaponry do indeed require a ‘new world order’ reflecting imperatives for leading states to act cooperatively rather than in conflictual manner.
However unlikely it now seems, it is possible that the Ukraine War will yet be remembered for producing a transition in outlook and behavior of global rivals in the direction of nonviolent geopolitics, multipolarism, and. multilateral global problem-solving. Arguably, China is currently showcasing the benefits of an increasingly activist form of geopolitics that seems intent on facilitating conflict resolution and peaceful relations, seeking a multipolar structure of world order that is not averse to demilitarizing international relations.
Geopolitical Fault Lines in a World of Sovereign States and a Few Great Powers
29 Apr[PREFATORY NOTE: A much modified earlier version of his post was published online by Transcend Medea Service (TMS) on April 17 2023; a longer post to address complexities of the Ukraine Crisis and Looming Tensions as to the future of Taiwan. ]
The Ukrainian Point of Departure: Mishandling the Aftermath of the Cold War
The Ukraine War is illustrative. There is no doubt that Russia violated the core prohibition of international law and the UN Charter prohibiting non-defensive recourse to international force when it launched its February 2022 attack on Ukraine. Also, the evidence is overwhelming that the United States irresponsibly and multiply provoked Russia by a series of interferences with the internal politics of Ukraine in the eight years preceding the invasion. Such provocations were expressive of Washington’s post-Cold War orientation of acting internationally as the one and only sovereign state with a geopolitical prerogative that permitted the pursuit of strategic interests without respect for geographical proximity and the restraints of international law, including the sanctity of the international boundaries of sovereign states. It is this post-Cold War circumstance that led the United States to become the first extra-territorial ‘global state,’ filling the temporary geopolitical vacuum of the 1990s with its delusion that such a condition could be permanently maintained. It is this factor that gave the Ukraine War such a high profile from its inception and prolonged its resolution. The made the direct challenge posed by Russia and the implicit one by relating to Taiwan so disquieting, given U.S. hegemonic worldview.
The launch of the Ukraine War became the occasion of a geopolitical war of position in which at stake were the relative alignments of the U.S., Russia, and China, and, contrary to public protestations in the West to contrary, second tier stakes involved effort to uphold the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. Expressed differently, the to be or not to be question is whether global security remains a traditional preoccupation of several governments managing a multipolar or bipolar world order. The alternative is to act as if this arrangement has been replaced by an existential shift to unipolarity in the aftermath of the 1991 Soviet implosion. In effect, the U.S sought to implement what amounted to a ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for the world.
This geopolitical proxy war in Ukraine is about the aftermath of the Cold War configurations of authority with regard to global peace and security. As such, it is about the alignment of the Great Powers in the world for which there are no established guidelines, accompanied by a refusal of political actors with a traditional geopolitical status, namely China and Russia, to leave the global management of power to the United States. As recently as early April 2023 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the UN Security Council articulated a Russian awareness of the strategic issues at stake when he rejected a ‘unipolar world order by one hegemon’ and proposed a ‘new world order’ along multipolar lines based on principles that needed to be established by agreements reached through the diplomatic efforts of China, U.S. and Russia.
After World War II
Despite the devastating world wars of the 20th century and the widespread fear in 1945 of a future war fought with weapons on mass destruction, the more internationalist approaches to global governance proved insufficient. The ambition of substituting international law as implemented by the UN for a continued reliance on the managerial skills and responsible self-restraint of dominant states turned out to be almost irrelevant to the overriding objective of avoiding World War III. The UN was established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical discretionary habits, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished, or at least, greatly limited hopes of transcending dangerous Great Power rivalries of the past. This failure of internationalism led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite close calls and good luck, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.
It is my contention that this fear of a resumption of major warfare never materialized because principal geopolitical fault lines had been established and respected between the West and the USSR by diplomatic agreements reached at Yalta, Moscow, and Potsdam in the last years of World War II producing a series of prudent political compromises resulting in dividing countries, and even cities and regions between East and West orientations. By far the most important arrangement of this character involved the agreed division of Europe, with special attention accorded Germany, and Berlin. These fault lines were also respected due to an understanding that breeching them could quickly escalate into a mutually disastrous war fought with nuclear weapons, and a reinforcing informal, yet robust, tabu about crossing the nuclear threshold by threatened or actual use of weaponry of mass destruction. To be sure, the credibility of the fault lines was backed up by opposed military capabilities that were at the ready in the event of any serious violation.
The close calls during the Cold War decades occurred when perceptions in Washington or Moscow put the relevant fault lines under challenge, by intention or misunderstanding, perhaps most notably in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. Although dumb luck played a role in avoiding the confrontation, as Martin Sherwin convincingly demonstrating in his masterful Gambling with Armageddon (2020) so did the realization of leaders in Moscow and Washington that there were dangerous ambiguities in the formulation of the fault lines. For the Soviet Union, U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in its Turkish neighbor was treated as equivalent its decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, especially given the real threat of a U.S. or U.S. backed intervention being directed at Castro’s Marxist government. For the United States this Soviet challenge was interpreted as an unacceptable encroachment on a vital Caribbean sphere of influence close to the U.S. homeland, purporting also to discourage any American future efforts to replace the Castro government by a regime-changing intervention.
To avoid victory/defeat scenarios in this encounter led the Soviets to abandon the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. to remove discreetly nuclear weapons from Turkey rationalizing the initiative by arguing that they were headed for ‘retirement’ in any event. In other words, a more or less reciprocal backdown from postures of menacing confrontation was achieved largely resulting from the direct communications between the respective leaders in the midst of the crisis. Respecting spheres of influence, thanks to crucial agreements reached by the wartime diplomacy in 1944-45, the U.S. enjoyed a free hand in Western Europe and the Soviets in Eastern Europe, as well as the subdivision of Germany and the sub-sub division of Berlin. It was this recognition of and respect for such traditional spheres of influence that likely prevented World War III, especially in discouraging the kind of coercive responses by NATO countries to the crude and brutal Soviet interventions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) even in the face of conservative and militarist pressures to do so.
The two most prolonged wars during the Cold War were in Korea and Vietnam where neither side had major strategic interests, nuclear deployments, nor were geopolitical alignments significantly engaged. This runs contrary to Antony Blinken’s contention in the ‘rule-governed’ world that the U.S. respects, but its rivals supposedly do not. Blinken has publicly insisted that spheres of influence were thrown into the dustbin of history as of the end of World War II. The nature of what is Blinken’s source of rule governance, other than the foreign policy of the United States, has never been officially disclosed. What we know is that it is something currently presented by the highest U.S. foreign policy official as something radically different than either international law and the multipolar framing of world politics by Russia and China, countries which obviously give weight and legitimacy to their regional prerogatives and traditional spheres of influence. Perhaps, the spirit of the rule-governed world that Blinken believes has become the ‘new world order’ is best captured by the phrase ‘pax Americana.’ This label is more transparent of intent and effect than is the abstraction of ‘unipolarity.’
Past and Present Diplomatic Limits
Historians agree that World War I arose out of a series of interacting miscalculations by the Great Powers of Europe that resulted in a deadly war costing tens of millions of lives and great devastation, and changing nothing. This conflict exemplified the dangers of managing global power relations without geopolitical fault lines. However, the peace diplomacy at Versailles after combat ended in 1918 failed in its war prevention efforts centering on the establishment of the League of Nations, a punitive peace imposed on Germany, and an acceptance of unregulated international economic rivalry. Fascism and the Great Depression ensued, and new challenges were mounted against world order, abetted by Japan’s rise, which produced World War II. This destructive struggle led to a victory for the liberal democracies but also the onset of the Nuclear Age. A second effort at war prevention was undertaken, and although the UN was marginalized by the two ‘superpowers,’ and ‘world peace’ rested on a combination of prudent self-restraint, mutual deterrence, and the largely effective respect shown geopolitical fault lines established in Europe.
This combination of developments led to the long Cold War of arms races, interventions, and ideological antagonism yet succeeded in avoiding a third world war. Unfortunately, the Cold War ended in the early 1990s with available steps not taken to bolster war prevention capabilities, and the peoples of the world find themselves helpless at the edge of the cliff with the only hopeful sign a belated willingness of both sides to recognize that the Ukraine War would be most likely to end in a stalemate, leaving the post-Cold War geopolitical alignment unresolved. In conformity with my analysis, if this happens, the incentives to achieve a diplomatic recognition acknowledging the relevance of geopolitical fault lines for the 21st Century might occur but only if there is enough pressure by peace forces from below and rationality from above.
Not Forgetting Taiwan
Finally, a brief word on dangers of war in the Pacific arising out of the U.S./China relationship. It risks crossing the invisible line separating competition, which is consistent with peace and even cooperation motivated by mutual interests, from conflict, which teeters on the perilous edges of crisis, confrontation, and ‘warfare,’ hot or cold.
The core present question is whether China intends to coerce Taiwan to achieve existential subordination to China or retains a position of what has been called ‘creative ambiguity’ by former U.S. diplomat, Chas Freeman. The essence of this deliberate ambiguity is to acknowledge simultaneously that Taiwan is part of China while allowing it to enjoy the full benefits of internal independence from China. This distinctive formula of diplomatic accommodation is embodied in the Shanghai Communique signed by the two countries in 1972 and respected for the last 50 years. The nature of the geopolitical fault line is a diplomatic compromise between the exercise of Chinese sovereign control over Taiwan and fulfilling Taiwan’s aspirations for independent statehood.
If either side acts to undermine the Shanghai arrangement it will invite a situation in some ways resembling the situation of provocative uncertainty leading to the Ukraine War. Mutual observance, in contrast, would help sustain an atmosphere of
Geopolitical Fault Lines in a World of Sovereign States and a Few Great Powers
[A much modified earlier version of his post was published in the online listserv Transcend Midea Service (TMS) on April 17 2023; a longer post to address complexities of the Ukraine Crisis and Looming Tensions as to the future of Tawan. ]
The Ukrainian Point of Departure: Mishandling the Aftermath of the Cold War
The Ukraine War is illustrative. There is no doubt that Russia violated the core prohibition of international law and the UN Charter prohibiting non-defensive recourse to international force when it launched its February 24, 2022 attack on Ukraine. Also, the evidence is overwhelming that the United States irresponsibly and multiply provoked Russia by a series of interferences with the internal politics of Ukraine in the eight years preceding the invasion. Such provocations were expressive of Washington’s post-Cold War orientation of acting internationally as the one and only sovereign state with a geopolitical prerogative that permitted the pursuit of strategic interests without respect for geographical proximity and the restraints of international law, including the sanctity of the international boundaries of sovereign states. It is this post-Cold War circumstance that led the United States to become the first extra-territorial ‘global state,’ filling the temporary geopolitical vacuum of the 1990s with its delusion that such a condition could be permanently maintained. It is this factor that gave the Ukraine War such a high profile from its inception and prolonged its resolution. The made the direct challenge posed by Russia and the implicit one by relating to Taiwan so disquieting, given U.S. hegemonic worldview.
The launch of the Ukraine War became the occasion of a geopolitical war of position in which at stake were the relative alignments of the U.S., Russia, and China, and, contrary to public protestations in the West to contrary, second tier stakes involved effort to uphold the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. Expressed differently, the to be or not to be question is whether global security remains a traditional preoccupation of several governments managing a multipolar or bipolar world order. The alternative is to act as if this arrangement has been replaced by an existential shift to unipolarity in the aftermath of the 1991 Soviet implosion. In effect, the U.S sought to implement what amounted to a ‘Monroe Doctrine’ for the world.
This geopolitical proxy war in Ukraine is about the aftermath of the Cold War configurations of authority with regard to global peace and security. As such, it is about the alignment of the Great Powers in the world for which there are no established guidelines, accompanied by a refusal of political actors with a traditional geopolitical status, namely China and Russia, to leave the global management of power to the United States. As recently as early April 2023 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the UN Security Council articulated a Russian awareness of the strategic issues at stake when he rejected a ‘unipolar world order by one hegemon’ and proposed a ‘new world order’ along multipolar lines based on principles that needed to be established by agreements reached through the diplomatic efforts of China, U.S. and Russia.
After World War II
Despite the devastating world wars of the 20th century and the widespread fear in 1945 of a future war fought with weapons on mass destruction, the more internationalist approaches to global governance proved insufficient. The ambition of substituting international law as implemented by the UN for a continued reliance on the managerial skills and responsible self-restraint of dominant states turned out to be almost irrelevant to the overriding objective of avoiding World War III. The UN was established in an atmosphere of hope and fear, but also within limits set by state-centrism and geopolitical discretionary habits, giving rise quickly to tensions that extinguished, or at least, greatly limited hopes of transcending dangerous Great Power rivalries of the past. This failure of internationalism led to Cold War bipolarity with its complex ideological, military, territorial, and political dimensions of intense conflict. And yet World War III was avoided, despite close calls and good luck, in the ensuing 45 years after the end of World War II.
It is my contention that this fear of a resumption of major warfare never materialized because principal geopolitical fault lines had been established and respected between the West and the USSR by diplomatic agreements reached at Yalta, Moscow, and Potsdam in the last years of World War II producing a series of prudent political compromises resulting in dividing countries, and even cities and regions between East and West orientations. By far the most important arrangement of this character involved the agreed division of Europe, with special attention accorded Germany, and Berlin. These fault lines were also respected due to an understanding that breeching them could quickly escalate into a mutually disastrous war fought with nuclear weapons, and a reinforcing informal, yet robust, tabu about crossing the nuclear threshold by threatened or actual use of weaponry of mass destruction. To be sure, the credibility of the fault lines was backed up by opposed military capabilities that were at the ready in the event of any serious violation.
The close calls during the Cold War decades occurred when perceptions in Washington or Moscow put the relevant fault lines under challenge, by intention or misunderstanding, perhaps most notably in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. Although dumb luck played a role in avoiding the confrontation, as Martin Sherwin convincingly demonstrating in his masterful Gambling with Armageddon (2020) so did the realization of leaders in Moscow and Washington that there were dangerous ambiguities in the formulation of the fault lines. For the Soviet Union, U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in its Turkish neighbor was treated as equivalent its decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, especially given the real threat of a U.S. or U.S. backed intervention being directed at Castro’s Marxist government. For the United States this Soviet challenge was interpreted as an unacceptable encroachment on a vital Caribbean sphere of influence close to the U.S. homeland, purporting also to discourage any American future efforts to replace the Castro government by a regime-changing intervention.
To avoid victory/defeat scenarios in this encounter led the Soviets to abandon the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. to remove discreetly nuclear weapons from Turkey rationalizing the initiative by arguing that they were headed for ‘retirement’ in any event. In other words, a more or less reciprocal backdown from postures of menacing confrontation was achieved largely resulting from the direct communications between the respective leaders in the midst of the crisis. Respecting spheres of influence, thanks to crucial agreements reached by the wartime diplomacy in 1944-45, the U.S. enjoyed a free hand in Western Europe and the Soviets in Eastern Europe, as well as the subdivision of Germany and the sub-sub division of Berlin. It was this recognition of and respect for such traditional spheres of influence that likely prevented World War III, especially in discouraging the kind of coercive responses by NATO countries to the crude and brutal Soviet interventions in Hungary (1956), East Germany (1958), and Czechoslovakia (1968) even in the face of conservative and militarist pressures to do so.
The two most prolonged wars during the Cold War were in Korea and Vietnam where neither side had major strategic interests, nuclear deployments, nor were geopolitical alignments significantly engaged. This runs contrary to Antony Blinken’s contention in the ‘rule-governed’ world that the U.S. respects, but its rivals supposedly do not. Blinken has publicly insisted that spheres of influence were thrown into the dustbin of history as of the end of World War II. The nature of what is Blinken’s source of rule governance, other than the foreign policy of the United States, has never been officially disclosed. What we know is that it is something currently presented by the highest U.S. foreign policy official as something radically different than either international law and the multipolar framing of world politics by Russia and China, countries which obviously give weight and legitimacy to their regional prerogatives and traditional spheres of influence. Perhaps, the spirit of the rule-governed world that Blinken believes has become the ‘new world order’ is best captured by the phrase ‘pax Americana.’ This label is more transparent of intent and effect than is the abstraction of ‘unipolarity.’
Past and Present Diplomatic Limits
Historians agree that World War I arose out of a series of interacting miscalculations by the Great Powers of Europe that resulted in a deadly war costing tens of millions of lives and great devastation, and changing nothing. This conflict exemplified the dangers of managing global power relations without geopolitical fault lines. However, the peace diplomacy at Versailles after combat ended in 1918 failed in its war prevention efforts centering on the establishment of the League of Nations, a punitive peace imposed on Germany, and an acceptance of unregulated international economic rivalry. Fascism and the Great Depression ensued, and new challenges were mounted against world order, abetted by Japan’s rise, which produced World War II. This destructive struggle led to a victory for the liberal democracies but also the onset of the Nuclear Age. A second effort at war prevention was undertaken, and although the UN was marginalized by the two ‘superpowers,’ and ‘world peace’ rested on a combination of prudent self-restraint, mutual deterrence, and the largely effective respect shown geopolitical fault lines established in Europe.
This combination of developments led to the long Cold War of arms races, interventions, and ideological antagonism yet succeeded in avoiding a third world war. Unfortunately, the Cold War ended in the early 1990s with available steps not taken to bolster war prevention capabilities, and the peoples of the world find themselves helpless at the edge of the cliff with the only hopeful sign a belated willingness of both sides to recognize that the Ukraine War would be most likely to end in a stalemate, leaving the post-Cold War geopolitical alignment unresolved. In conformity with my analysis, if this happens, the incentives to achieve a diplomatic recognition acknowledging the relevance of geopolitical fault lines for the 21st Century might occur but only if there is enough pressure by peace forces from below and rationality from above.
Not Forgetting Taiwan
Finally, a brief word on dangers of war in the Pacific arising out of the U.S./China relationship. It risks crossing the invisible line separating competition, which is consistent with peace and even cooperation motivated by mutual interests, from conflict, which teeters on the perilous edges of crisis, confrontation, and ‘warfare,’ hot or cold.
The core present question is whether China intends to coerce Taiwan to achieve existential subordination to China or retains a position of what has been called ‘creative ambiguity’ by former U.S. diplomat, Chas Freeman. The essence of this deliberate ambiguity is to acknowledge simultaneously that Taiwan is part of China while allowing it to enjoy the full benefits of internal independence from China. This distinctive formula of diplomatic accommodation is embodied in the Shanghai Communique signed by the two countries in 1972 and respected for the last 50 years. The nature of the geopolitical fault line is a diplomatic compromise between the exercise of Chinese sovereign control over Taiwan and fulfilling Taiwan’s aspirations for independent statehood.
If either side acts to undermine the Shanghai arrangement it will invite a situation in some ways resembling the situation of provocative uncertainty leading to the Ukraine War. Mutual observance, in contrast, would help sustain an atmosphere of peaceful competition between the two countries and demonstrate that geopolitical fault lines can do what neither international law nor the UN are capable of presently doing, setting mutually respected limits in situations of strategic disagreement and tensions between Great Powers.
competition between the two countries and demonstrate that geopolitical fault lines can do what neither international law nor the UN are capable of presently doing, setting mutually respected limits in situations of strategic disagreement and tensions between Great Powers.
A Special SHAPE Webinar Featuring Daniel Ellsberg’s Keynote
19 AprOn behalf of SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth), we co-convenors extend a warm invitation to your members, affiliates and others in your network to a webinar (flyer attached) on The Rising Danger of Nuclear War with Daniel Ellsberg. Responding to his keynote address will be Richard Falk and Zia Mian – this Friday 21 April. It is a notable occasion to have this opportunity to listen to this live statement by Daniel Ellsberg on these themes as his own extraordinary life of dedication and witnessing approaches its end.
LA 2.00 pm Mexico City 3.00 pm New York 5.00 pm Buenos Aires 6.00 pm London 10.00 pm
SHAPE was initiated some months ago with a CALL to individuals and groups around the world. It seeks to build a community of individuals and groups sharing this sense of urgency about the present historical situation, dramatized by the dual challenges of the prolonged Ukraine War, generating dangerously escalating tensions between Russia and the United States and the worsening prospects of responding adequately to climate change. SHAPE has previously arranged two prior successful webinars. We regard this event as our most ambitious and significant event and hope you will be with us.
In this spirit, we urge you to join with over 4,000 other to read and ENDORSE our Call, which is attached together with a link for its endorsement. The poster for the webinar is also attached.
Joe Camilleri, Professor of International Relations Emeritus, LaTrobe University, Melbourne
Chandra Muzaffar, Director of JUST, Malaysia
Richard Falk, Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton Univeristy
Co-Convenors of SHAPE
DEMOCRACY AT RISK FOR JEWS IN ISRAEL, BARE SURVIVAL FOR PALESTINIANS
7 Apr[Prefatory Note: A modified version of this post was published in CounterPunch on April 5, 2023, and written prior to the shocking attacks by Israeli armed police on worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque; further escalation may result during the days ahead if ultra-religious Jews go ahead with plans for incursions at Al-Aqsa in the course of the Passover holidays. As usual, governments in the West and the main media platforms insufficiently depict and condemn Israeli violence or the rockets fired from neighboring Lebanon as well as Gaza in response to the violation of Palestinian rights of worship producing disproportionate Israeli artillery and air strikes.]
More than ‘Democracy’ is at Stake in Israeli Protests
Israeli police violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque directed at Palestinian worshippers in the midst of Ramadan on the nights of April 5 and 6 is a serious violation of international arrangements in Jerusalem to protect Muslim holy sites, none more sacred than Al-Aqsa. It interfered with prayer rituals important to hundreds of worshippers allowed entry, producing mass arrests, denials of entry to the mosque, and beatings of unarmed Palestinians. These incidents are of the same criminal quality as the settler destruction of the village of Huwara (near Nablus), and a reminder that Netanyahu is unwilling or unable to control these violent excesses of Israeli extremists acting in this manner with encouragement from leading members of his cabinet.
There are two interwoven conflicts currently playing out in Israel, but neither,
despite the Western liberal spin, relates to a supposedly threatened demise of Israeli democracy. Such a concern presupposes that Israel had been a democracy until this recent wave of extremism arising from the new Netanyahu-led Israeli government’s commitment to ‘judicial reform.’ A euphemism hiding the purpose of such an undertaking, which was to limit judicial independence by endowing the Knesset with the powers to impose the will of a parliamentary majority, if needed, to override Israeli court decisions by a simple majority and, in addition, exercise greater control over the appointment of judges. Certainly, these were moves toward institutionalizing a tighter autocracy in Israel as it would modify some semblance of separation of powers, but it was in no way a nullification of democracy as best expressed by legal guarantees of equal rights enjoyed by all citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religious persuasion.
Israel, as a Jewish State that confers by its own Basic Law of 2018 the inalienaable right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people and asserts ethnic supremacy at the expense of the Palestinian minority within its own borders of more than 1.7 million persons undermines Israel’s claim to be a democracy, at least with reference to the citizenry as a whole. As well, Palestinians have long endured discriminatory laws and practices on fundamental issues that over time have led the governance policies of the country to be widely and convincingly identified as an apartheid regime. Israeli apartheid is operative in both the Occupied Palestine Territories and Israel itself. If the idea of democracy is stretched beyond reasonable limits, it is possible to regard Israel as an ethno-democracy or theocratic democracy, yet these terms are vivid reminders that to view Israel as a ‘democracy’ is itself a political oxymoron.
Since its establishment as a state in 1948, Israel has denied equal rights to its Palestinian minority. It has even disallowed any right of return to the 750,000 Palestinians who were coerced to leave during the 1947 War, and are entitled by international law to return home, at least after combat has ceased. The current bitter fight between religious and secular Jews centering on the independence of Israel’s judiciary is rather remote from most Palestinian concerns and is regarded as an intramural Jewish squabble. Such a view reflects the Palestinian disillusionment with Israel’s justice system. Since 1948, Israel’s highest courts have consistently supported Israel’s most internationally controversial moves, including ‘unlawfully’ restricting Palestinians, establishing Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, denying the right of return, upholding the separation wall of occupied territory, collective punishment, annexation of East Jerusalem, house demolitions, and prisoner abuse.
On a few occasions, most notably with respect to reliance on some torture techniques used against Palestinian prisoners the judiciary has shown slight glimmers of hope that it might address Palestinian grievance in a balanced manner, but after more than 75 years of Israel’s existence and 56 years of its occupation of Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 this hope has effectively vanished.
Nevertheless, Israel’s control of the political narrative that shaped public opinion allowed the country be to be legitimized, even celebrated by hyperbolic rhetoric as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ and as such, the one country in the Middle East with whom North America and Europe shared values alongside interests. In essence, Biden reaffirmed this canard in the text of the Jerusalem Declaration jointly signed with Yair Lapid, the Prime Minister of Israel at the time, during the American president’s state visit last August. In its opening paragraph these sentiments are expressed: “The United States and Israel share an unwavering commitment to democracy…”
Prior to Israel’s election last November that resulted in a coalition government regarded as the most right-wing in the country’s history, the U.S. government and diaspora Jewry seemed intent on ignoring the deepening civil society consensus that Israel was guilty of inflicting an apartheid regime to maintain its ethnic dominance that was subjugating and exploiting Palestinians living in Occupied Palestine and Israel. Apartheid is outlawed by international human rights law, and treated in international law as a severe crime, widely viewed as second only to genocide. Notable opponents of the extreme racism of South Africa, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and John Dugard have each commented that Israeli apartheid treats Palestinians worse than the cruelties that South Africa inflicted on their black African majority population. South African apartheid was condemned at the UN and throughout the world as internationally intolerable racism. Allegations of Israeli apartheid have been abundantly documented in a series of authoritative reports: UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (2017), Human Rights Watch (2021), B’Tselem (2021), Amnesty International (2022). Despite these condemnations, the U.S. Government and liberal pro-Israel NGOs have avoided even the mention of the apartheid dimension of the Israeli state, not daring to open the issue for debate by attempting to refute the allegations. As Dugard pointed out when asked what was the greatest difference between fighting apartheid in South Africa and Israel, he recently responded: “..the weaponization of antisemitism.” This has been borne out in my own experience. There was considerable conservative opposition to anti-apartheid solidarity initiatives with respect to South Africa but never the attempt to brand activists as themselves wrongdoers, even ‘criminals.’ The IHRA definition of antisemitism that conflates harsh criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews has given Zionists a powerful punitive tool by which to deflect pro-Palestinian activism by branding adherents as antisemites.
From these perspectives, what is at stake in the protests, is whether Israel is to be treated as an illiberal democracy of the sort fashioned in Hungary by Viktor Orban, diluting the quality of the procedural democracy that had been operative for Israeli Jews since 1948. The new turn in Israel gestures toward the kind of majoritarian rule that has prevailed for the last decade in Turkey, involves a headlong slide toward outright an intra-Jewish autocracy in Israel. Yet we should note that in neither Hungary nor Turkey have governance structures of an apartheid character emerged, although both countries have been serious issues involving discrimination against minorities. Turkey has for decades has rejected demands from its Kurdish minority for equal rights and separate statehood, or at least a strong version of autonomy as well as upholding human rights. These instances of encroachment on basic human rights in Turkey and Hungary have at least not occurred within a framework of settler colonialism that in Israel has made Palestinians strangers, virtual aliens, in their own homeland where they have resided for centuries.
Racism is not the only reason to dissent from the democracy-in-jeopardy discourse, dispossession may be the even more consequential one. If native people were to be asked whether they worried about the erosion or even the abandonment of democracy in such settler colonial ‘success stories’ as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. the question itself would have no current existential relevance to their lives. Native peoples were never meant to be included in the democratic mandate that these encroaching settler communities adopted so proudly, while being contemptuously indifferent to the exclusion of native peoples. Their tragic fate was sealed as soon as the colonial settlers arrived. It was in each instance one of marginalization, dispossession, and suppression. This indigenous struggle for ‘bare survival’ as distinct peoples with a viable culture and ways of life of their own making is one of several scandals of modernity. The destruction that was so produced amounts to what Lawrence Davidson has called ‘cultural genocide” in his pathbreaking book of 2012, which even then included a chapter condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian society.
Underneath the encounter among Israeli Jews, which allegedly discloses a chasm so deep as to threaten civil war in Israel lies the future of the settler colonial project in Israel. As those who have studied ethnic dispossession in other settler colonial contexts have concluded, unless the settlers manage to stabilize their own supremacy and limit international solidarity initiatives, they will eventually lose political control as happened in South Africa and Algeria under very different schemes of settler domination. It is this sense that the Israel protests going on need to be interpreted as a double confrontation. What is explicitly at stake is a bitter encounter between secular and ultra-religious Jews the outcome of which is relevant to what the Palestinians can expect to be their short-run fate going forward. There is also the implicit stake between those who favor maintaining the existing apartheid arrangements resting on discriminatory hegemony but without necessarily insisting on territorial and demographic adjustments and those who are intent on using violent means to extinguish the Palestinian ‘presence’ as any sort of impediment to the further purification of the Jewish state as incorporating the West Bank, and finally fulfilling the vision of Israel as coterminous with the whole of the ‘the promised land’ asserted as a biblical entitlement of Jews as proclaimed by the mainstream Zionist optic.
It is a mystery where Netanyahu, the pragmatic extremist, stands, and perhaps he has yet to make up his mind. Thomas Friedman, the most reliable weathervane of liberal Zionism weighs in with the claim that Netanyahu for the first time in his long political career has become an ‘irrational’ leader that is no longer trustworthy from the perspective of Washington because his tolerance of Jewish extremism is putting at risk the vital strategic relationship with the U.S. while discrediting what has long been an illusion of reaching a peaceful resolution of the conflict by diplomacy and the implementation of a two-state compromise. Such tenets of a liberal approach were deliberately rendered obsolete by the scale of Israeli settlements and land-grabs beyond the 1948 green line, which itself confined Palestinian hopes to only 22% of Palestine as it was under the British mandate and UN Partition Plan.
Politically, Netanyahu needed the support of Religious Zionism to regain power and obtain support for judicial reform to evade being potentially held personally accountable for fraud, corruption, and the betrayal of the public trust. Yet ideologically, I suspect Netanyahu is not as uncomfortable with the scenario favored by the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benezel Smotrich as he sometimes pretends. It allows him to shift blame for dirty deeds in dealing with the Palestinians. To avoid the dreaded South African outcome, Netanyahu seems unlikely to oppose another final round of dispossession and marginalization of the Palestinians while Israel embarks on the completion of a maximal version of the Zionist Project. For now Netanyahu seems to be riding both horses, playing a moderating role with respect to the Jewish fight about judicial reform, while winking slyly at those who make no secret of their resolve to induce a second nakba (in Arabic, ‘catastrophe’), a term applied specifically to the 1948 expulsion. For many Palestinians the nakba is experienced as an ongoing process rather than an event limited by time and place with highs and lows.
My guess is that Netanyahu, himself an extremist when addressing Israelis in Hebrew, has still not decided whether he can continue to rise both horses or must soon choose which to ride. Having appointed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to the key positions vesting control over Palestinians and as the chief regulators of settler violence it is pure mystification to consider that Netanyahu as going through a political midlife crisis or finding himself a captive of uncongenial coalition partners. What he is doing is letting it happen, blaming the religious right for excesses, but not unhappy with their tactics of seeking a victorious end of the Zionist Project.
Liberal Zionists should be deeply concerned about the degree to which these developments in Israel give rise to a new wave of real antisemitism, which is the opposite of the weaponized IHRA kind that Israel and its supporters around the world have been using as state propaganda against critics of state policies and practices. These targeted critics of Israel have no hostility whatsoever to Jews as a people and feel respectful toward Judaism as a great world religion. Rather than respond substantively to criticisms of its behavior, Israel has for more than a decade deflected discussion of its wrongdoing by pointing a finger at its critics and some institutions, especially the UN, International Criminal Court, and the Human Rights Council where allegations of Israeli racism and criminality have been made based on evidence and scrupulous adherence to existing standards of the rule of law. Such an approach, emphasizing the implementation of international law, contrasts with the irresponsible Israeli evasions of substantive allegations by leveling attacks on critics rather than either comply with the applicable norms or engage substantively by insisting that their practices toward the Palestinian people are reasonable in light of legitimate security concerns, which was the principal tactic during their first decades of their existence.
In this sense, the recent events in Israel are dangerously portraying Jews as racist criminals in their behavior toward subjugated Palestinians, done with the blessings of the government. The unpunished settler violence toward Palestinian communities has even been affirmed by relevant government officials as in the deliberate destruction of the small village of Huwara. photo-recorded aftermath of settlers dancing in celebration amid the village ruins, is surely a kind of Kristallnacht, which of course is not meant to minimize the horrors of Nazi genocide, but unfortunately invites comparisons and disturbing questions. Such impressions are rendered even more plausible by harrowing photos of Israeli police beating Al_Aqsa worshippers. How can Jews act so violently against a vulnerable native people living amongst them, yet denied basic rights? And will not this kind of grotesque spectacle perversely motivate neo-Nazi groups and rightists throughout the world to castigate all Jews? In effect, Israel by both cheapening the real menace of antisemitism in this IHRA process of attaching the label where it doesn’t belong and at the same time arousing hatred of Jews by documented renditions of their inhuman behavior toward a people forcibly estranged from their native land. By so acting, Israel is making itself vulnerable in a manner potentially damaging to Jews everywhere, which is an inevitable global spillover from this inflammatory campaign of the Netanyahu government to victimize even more acutely the Palestinian people, aiming at their total submission, or better their substantial departure from their own homeland.
Demonic Optimism: Biden’s State of the Union Address
18 FebI was especially struck by some words following the habitual long litany of presidential achievements, which was for much different reasons also selected by Democratic Party fund raising machine that is never idle. Here is their version of the passage, conveyed the next morning as a private message from the President himself to me:
“I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of America, Richard. I mean it. We’re a nation with a strong soul, a strong backbone, and a strong people. We just have to remember this and remember who we are. There is nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.”
I listened to these words, presumably inserted for their inspirational impact on a gullible citizenry, with stunned disbelief. I long wondered how such inauthentic sentiments could have slipped by the entourage of previously reliable self-censoring staffers who apparently fine tune every prepared word that emanates from the White House. I was further perplexed and disturbed despite understanding better the mercenary intentions underlying this supposedly uplifting coda when I came to realize that this follow up was one more appeal in an endless succession of daily pleas from Democratic leaders for money to support the Democratic Party, including the listing of proposed pledge amounts that we sheep might contribute.
These most offending words drawn from a long presidential address still came as a surprise, overriding in effect many genuine domestic achievements of the Biden presidency. Maybe the funding prominence is a prelude to the 2024 campaign for a second term, and should be interpreted as nothing other than a rallying cry that deliberately suppresses the grim realities facing America offering in their stead more ‘bread and circuses,’ in effect, a promise that Nero will keep fiddling.
If I had been a person of color, an indigenous survivor, or just poor, I might have wondered whether this inappropriately optimistic message could be more purposely rephrased: “I’ve never been more pessimistic about the future of America. We’re a nation tainted by a weak soul, a racist, patrioteering backbone, and seemingly forever love affairs with guns, war, and militarism. We could do far better for ourselves and others around the world, if we try finally to acknowledge the sins of the past and failures of the present. In the spirit of long overdue and solemn remembrance, I call upon all citizens to take steps to soften these national memories of who we were by transferring some future expenditures from future annual military budgets to a reparations trust fund for the benefit of past and present victims of slavery, ethnic cleansing, and official forms of racism directed at native Americans and African Americans. If we as a nation want to be serious about overcoming this tainted past of our country we must also become more positively engaged in the wider planetary struggles for justice and species survival. It would be an embrace of futility and folly to pretend that we can currently meet these challenges by acting collectively when we cannot even cooperate at home on behalf of national public wellbeing, much less internationally, for the global common good. If I were to indulge in the luxury of speaking honestly to the leaders of country, I would have to admit that we seem currently able to act together only when it comes to waging war or preparing for war with real or imagined adversaries.”
In other words, not only was this latest SOUA out of touch with the experience of most Americans, but it seemed somewhat oddly incomprehensible to preach national unity while soliciting funds claimed to be needed to ensure that Democrats stay in control of the government. Certainly not the Republican opposition nor indeed the party whose achievements Biden praises have the slightest intention of resting the future of America on “our capacity” to act together. Biden, or at least the party officialdom clearly understands the depth of polarization, reinforcing their pitch for funds with these standard partisan words: “And we need to elect more Democrats to get more done.” I find it significant that only these words are bolded in the funding appeal I received from party headquarter, apparently highlighting their sense that the core idea of the presidential address was that only by donating money to the good guys can virtue prevail given the intensity of national antagonisms being that are being expressed in the clash of ideas about how to shape the future. It is hard to predict from the standpoint of the present whether Biden’s future biographers will pause to take note of such a gross contradiction, and if so, explain this tension in approach as habitual hypocrisy or mercenary opportunism, or some combination. Reckoning with the past is almost as uncertain as predicting the future. What does seem clear is that only corrupt apologists would suggest that Biden’s words of extreme optimism were expressions of genuine beliefs, given their detachment from the vivid daily reminders of various forms of wrongdoing that dominates the country’s past and present behavior.
One cynical possibility is to point to the occasion as one in which the national leader by tradition and habit only dwells on the positive, with no concern about whether it depicts reality or not. Yet the times are too dangerous to be content with such an lame excuse for false witnessing, for which is what I indict Biden and the party leads.
By wrapping this appeal for contributions in an unbridled sense of optimism about the future of the nation and its people is more puzzling because no accompanying effort, however flimsy, is made to give reasons for such reckless disregard of the array of national and global menaces that daily and obviously darkly cloud the country’s future as never before. It suggests a provocative question-Can we truly distinguish Biden’s outlook from Donald Trump’s primetime slogan so often held in liberal contempt—‘Make America Great Again’? Maybe this unlikely convergence of outlooks reflects a perverse and unconscious inner belief that indeed we are coming together. To gain an upper hand in the face of my taunt, Biden might respond to the similarly phrased Trumpist claim by an insistence that America is already great, and so there is no need to make it great, especially if that involves following Trump’s regressive path to greatness. But this would be to dwell even more obviously in a delusional comfort zone.
Biden should be ashamed of such expressions of optimism about our national future when hardly a day has passed without a mass shooting at a school or public social setting such as a dance hall or public cultural event; over 200 mass shootings in the first two months of 2023. In addition, recent reports suggest that suicide rates in America are again on the rise among veterans, persons of color, that teen misery has never been higher, and that the large number of citizens who struggle to earn enough to provide health, food, and housing for their families makes a mockery of Biden’s boast about economic recovery during his tenure. For more detailed documentation of such bleak generalizations visit these websites <gunviolencearchive.org><cdc.gov>
Biden is misleading the public when bloody manifestations of gun violence and acute depression are disproportionately much higher in America than in comparably industrialized societies. And what is in some ways worse than the tragedies themselves is the societal inertia that has followed, that so little of what could be done is even proposed and debated, much less undertaken. Such whitewashing of national wrongdoing should induce remorse rather than evasive denial. In no other country in the world, not currently afflicted by severe internal strife or large-scale combat do parents worry that they might never again see their children alive if they fail to return home from school at the expected time. And yet not even a whisper is heard about repealing or at least recast the Constitutional right to bear arms, as set forth in Article II, and interpreted very permissively.
Should our leaders keep hiding from the citizenry the bad stuff about poverty, racism, gun culture, encroachments on academic freedom, and global militarism (higher annual military expenditures than the next nine countries, highest international sales and profits of corporate merchants of death, hundreds of overseas bases, rejuvenation of military alliances, predatory behavior with respect to natural resources)? As citizens should we not be entitled to hear about some ways forward that will involve struggles against these regressive features of the policy landscape? If these ugly truths begin to be acknowledged by those who manage governance, then the foundation might begin to exist enabling positive action, and give rise to hopes that it is at least possible to be cautiously positive about the future of the country. It may seem naïve to seek American leadership at this shrill time that exhibits humility, transmits truthful messages to citizens, and leaves audiences with a sense of overall urgent concern. It is certainly an appropriate moment for grandiose expressions of national pride and the downplaying of threats to the future quality of life in the country and throughout the planet. The national situation is far too deeply challenged for us to be content with presidential bromides. What is most needed are policies and practices that embody compassion, and are dedicated with the fullness of being to responding to the imperatives of human security as all levels of social interaction and natural habitat from the local to the planetary, even the cosmic.
Saint Valentine
14 Feb[a whimsical poem to celebrate the love legacy of Saint Valentine, written by Marianne Moore 63 years ago, published in The New Yorker on Feb. 13, 1960, dedicated by me to all of us who love poetry and dare to love love on Valentine’s Day 2023.]
Saint Valentine
permitted to assist you, let me see..
If those remembered by you
are to think of you and not me.
it seems to me that the momento
or compliment that you bestow
should have a name beginning with ‘V’
such as Vera, El Greco’s only
daughter (though it has never been
that he had one). Her starchy
veil, inside chiffon: the stone in her
ring, like her eyes, one hand on
her snow leopard wrap, the fur widely
dotted with black. It could be a vignette—
a replica, framed oval—
bordered by a vine or a vinelet.
Or give a mere flower, said to mean the
love of truth or truth of
love—in other words, a violet.
Verse—unabashedly bold—is appropriate;
and always it should be as neat
as the most careful writer’s ‘8,’
Any valentine that is written
Is as the vendange to the vine.
Might verse not best confuse itself with fate?
Marianne Moore
Ukraine – Rethinking Global Security
9 FebSaving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE)
An initiative to address the multiple crises that have brought us to the brink of the precipice.
Ukraine – Rethinking Global Security
This, our second webinar to be held on 22/23 February 2023, draws lessons from the Ukraine war and sets new pathways to global security.
REGISTER HERE
Moderator
Professor Joseph Camilleri
Professor Emeritus, La Trobe University, Melbourne; Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; Convener, Conversation at the Crossroads
Speakers
Professor Richard Falk
Emeritus Professor of International Law, Princeton University; Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London
Professor Kishore Mahbubani
Founding Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
Dr. Kate Hudson
General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) academic and author
Wei Yu
Codepink, Coordinator “China is Not Our Enemy” campaign
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar
Former Professor of Global Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang; President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)
Paulina Chan
Programming Director, Canada China Forum
Thursday 23 February, 2023
London: 8:00 Paris / Algiers: 9:00 Cairo: 10:00 Moscow: 11:00 Ankara: 12:00
New Delhi 13:30 Kuala Lumpur / Shanghai: 16:00 Tokyo: 17:00 Melbourne 19:00
Fiji 20:00 Auckland 21:00 Honolulu: 22:00 Los Angeles / Vancouver: Midnight (Wednesday)
SAVING HUMANIY AND PLANET EARTH
5 Febhttps://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YLETTUn-TeOKolWhFXuz3w
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Ukraine: Rethinking Global SecurityDescription
Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) is an initiative to address the multiple crises that have brought us to the brink of the precipice. This, our second webinar to be held on 22/23 February 2023, draws lessons from the Ukraine war and sets new pathways to global security. Moderated by Professor Joseph Camilleri.
Thursday 23rd February 2023. Time: London 08:00 – Paris/Algiers 09:00 – Cairo 10:00 – Moscow 11:00 – Ankara 12:00 – New Delhi 13:30 – Kuala Lumpur/Shanghai 16:00 – Tokyo 17:00 – Melbourne 19:00 – Fiji 20:00 – Auckland 21:00 – Honolulu 22:00 – Los Angeles/Vancouver 0:00 Midnight (Wednesday).Time
Feb 23, 2023 07:00 PM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
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Speakers
MODERATOR: Emeritus Professor Joseph Camilleri
La Trobe University, Melbourne; Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; Convener, Conversation at the Crossroads
Professor Richard Falk
Emeritus Professor of International Law, Princeton University; Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London
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Antony Blinken Plays the ‘Two Sides Game’: Getting Israel Off the Hook
31 Jan[Prefatory Note: The post below is based on my responses to an interview conducted by Rodrigo Craveiro, a Brazilian journalist who writes for Coorreio Brazilliense, the leading newspaper in the capital city of Brazillia.]
Antony Plays the Two Sides Game: Getting Netanyahu/Israel Off the Hook
Prelude: it is unclear to me whether Antony Blinken is acting other than as a loyal servant of President Joe Biden. But to make my point of departure as clear as possible, Blinken is the most lightweight Secretary of State a fitting complement to the overweight Mike Pompeo. Together they could do a late night TV comedy routine on the ‘arrogance of decline’ when it comes to America’s foreign policy in the Trump/Biden years. Their craven profile is most vividly expressed by their extreme subservience to extremist Israel, come what may, including its unlawful expansionism in occupied Palestine, and even the Golan Heights in Syria, which were Trump provocations endorsed by Biden. Given the outcome of the 2022 elections and the Netanyahu-led ‘extremist’ government, I would have thought Blinken/Biden could have been content to let this ugly culmination of Zionist ambitions pass in silence, rather than provide a public occasion for re-legitimating the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel as being as strong as ever, and unbreakable in the future no matter what.
True, the Western labeling of this new leadership cabal in Israel as ‘extremist’ is itself polemical, implying that what preceded was moderate.. I am inclined to argue that virtually the entire elite spectrum of Israeli political parties is ‘extremist’ given their role in shaping an apartheid style of Jewish supremacy in Israel and Occupied Palestine many years before many were worried about the rise of the religious right as a political force in the form of Religious Zionism. My point being that the subjugation, dispossession, and exclusion of a people in relation to their national homeland has been the tragic destiny imposed on the Palestinian people since 1945, a resultt achieved with the active, continuing, and substantial U.S. complicity. The UK and UN are certainly also partly to blame, having championed the partition of Palestine in 1947 without the consent of the resident population, which amounted to a denial of the most basic Palestinian rights, including the inalienable right of self-determination. Partition of a settler colonial state in an era of decolonization was also against the will of the peoples of the Middle East. As well, the UN and much of its membership then walked away after the 1948 War without condemning or reversing Israel’s territorial expansion by force, the forced mass exodus of Palestinians and the denial by Israel of their right of return to their homes and homeland, as also mandated by international law. If settler colonialism, de facto territorial annexations, and apartheid were not enough to fray the bonds between Washington and Tel Aviv, then it is hardly surprising that casting off the mantle of Israeli secular democracy would merit any rethinking of how the U.S. conceives of the ‘alliance of democracies’ that it purports to be leading in opposition to the Sino/Russian ‘alliance of autocracies.’
One last point, these displays of diplomatic steadfastness by the Biden/Lapid Declaration during a state visit to Israel a half year ago and now this post-election visit proved too much even for the corrupt and somewhat collaborationist Palestine Authority to swallow. President Mahmoud Abbas had the poise to dismiss Blinken’s ‘both sides’ approach to recent violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem with this rather mild rebuke: “We have found that the Israeli government is responsible for what’s happening these days,” that is, the upsurge of violence.“ Blinken did acknowledge, while in Ramallah for a few hours, that “what we’re seeing for Palestinians is a shrinkage of hope” that “needs to change.” This is double talk given Biden and Blinken’s much more weighty public display of solidarity with Israel, come what may. One is reminded of Hilary Clinton’s lame refrain after every Israel display of defiance with respect to international law, especially in the context of establishing additional Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, obviously a violation of Article 49(6) of the Geneva Conventions, as being ‘unhelpful.’
Without external pressure and internal resistance, South Africa would still be an apartheid state. The Palestinian horizon of hope will shrink until it disappears altogether with the continuation of resistance within and the spread of militant forms of global solidarity without. Without such pressure, and given such maintenance of geopolitical support, lament alone is not a liberation strategy for the Palestinian people.
1– Today US Secretary of State Blinken called Israel and Palestinian for “urgent steps” to calm spiralling violence in the conflict. How do you see this request and what kind of measures do you believe are much more urgent and credible to reduce tensions?
It is not appropriate under the circumstances to treat Israelis and Palestinians as equally responsible for the recent upsurge in violence. Israel’s provocations are the principal cause of the current crisis that accompanied the formation of what has been widely viewed as the most extreme Israeli government since the country came into existence 75 years ago, with crucial internal cabinet position being given to outspoken anti-Paklestinian racists, most prominently Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich of Religious Zionism coalition group.
Of course, from the perspective of international law and morality, the Zionist Project was from day one ‘extremist,’ although it showed its hand only gradually over a span of almost a century.
More appropriate measures responsive to the realities would be to suspend arms shipments to Isreal and to support UN censure of policies, practices, and Israeli leadership associated with racism, ethnic supremacy, and further dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland.
2– Do you believe the US could have a decisive protagonism to push Israel and palestinian to negotiate a deal? Or do you believe a peace deal is out of question at this point?
Israel, the side in totally dominant control, shows no interest in a diplomatic approach to finding a solution for the conflict. With such an extremist government in control of Israeli foreign policy, the emphasis has shifted from those committed to ending the conflict through diplomatic negotiations to a unilateral approach imposed by Israeli force, essentially stabilizing and gaining international acceptance of an exclusivist Jewish State stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This outcome controlled Israeli thinking and the unfinished agenda of. the Zionist Political Project for more than the prior 20 years, although not so openly and aggressively proclaimed as recently..
Given this situation, it would cause serious US/Israeli tensions if Washington were to push hard for a revived diplomacy that was claimed to be ‘a peace process.’ There is no domestic pressure in the U.S. on Biden to move in such a direction, and Blinken’s legitimating visit and reaffirmation of U.S. unconditional support of Israeli security is a further indication that no such move will be forthcoming from Washington beyond the misleading and likely ineffective Blinken call for mutual de-escalation, which most objective observers regard as an evasive diplomacy based on false symmetry, or more bluntly put, as whitewashing intensification of prolonged Palestinian victimization..
3– What is the risk of an escalate of violence trigger a new intifada in your view?
It is difficult to assess the thinking of the internationally recognized Palestinian leadership in Ramallah at this time, but the prospect of continuing Palestinian resistance to further Israeli violations of past understandings, such as formal Jewish visits to sacred Muslim sites will spontaneously spark escalated violence as does excessive use of force by Israeli security force and expansions of unlawful Israeli settlements. There would be widespread civil society support among Palestinians for a Third Intifada at this time, especially in the directly occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as well as among Palestinian support groups around the world.
Postlogue: It may be that Blinken’s real mission was to convey to Netanyahu in private the message that Israeli provocations are weakening public support for Israel in the United States, especially among younger generations of Jews. It is notable how the Western media has focused on the extent to which Israel’s turn to overt ‘extremism’ is of concern because. of its effect on Jewish support and how little attention is given to how this intensification of oppressive tactics magnifies Palestinian suffering.
Richard Falk
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He initiated this blog partly in celebration of his 80th birthday.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 