[Prefatory Note: In the face of the failure of the US Government to use its diplomatic
leverage to end the war in Ukraine, and renounce the project to score a geopolitical victory over Russia at the expense of the people of Ukraine (and Russia) and persisting with its active complicity with Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people residing in Gaza, and so far to a lesser extent to those residing in the West Bank, this book could not be timelier. It is a grim reminder of the Iraq War precedent in which the United States openly embraced a criminal path in both its attack and long occupation of Iraq beginning with “shock and awe’ unprovoked aggression and culminating in a state-building venture that brought the Islamic State to the region. Memories of geopolitical failures of the magnitude of what took place over the course of more than a decade of occupation and supposed state-building is brilliantly depicted in this authoritative book dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline Ismael, the long devoted partner of Tareq Ismael. It was my privilege to have been invited to write the foreword to this fine book, just published, which I strongly recommend both to remind us of the Iraq War and its dismal aftermath, and to cast light on the present negation of the most minimal standards of decency in the course of human interaction. I find myself haunted by a simple epistemological question: WHY DO WE AS A NATION, PEOPLE, AND SPECIES REFUSE TO LEARN FROM PAST TRAGIC FAILURES?]
Intrioducing Pax Americana: Ae
Foreword to Pax Americana: America’s Unending War on Iraq by
Jacqueline S. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, & Leslie T. MacDonald
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Narrating the Logic of Pax Americana
Recent references to the Iraq War of 2003 in the West tend mostly to
come from the political or anti-war left sources seemingly intent on issuing
stern reminders that Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was foreshadowed in
its most objectionable features by the US/UK attack followed by a long
controversial occupation of Iraq, while the mainstream tries to erase
America’s experience from collective memory.
Those invoking Iraq as a precedent relevant to Ukraine offer a justifi-
able critique of the imperial aspects of American foreign policy that make
a mockery of self-righteous appeals to international law and the UN
Charter to mobilize international opposition to Russia while building
global support for sanctions, arms shipments, and huge donations of eco-
nomic assistance. Adopting such an ahistorical, abstract, and Eurocentric
optic, however useful, comes at a price. Iraq loses its core reality as a coun-
try inhabited by people who have endured the trials and tribulations of
tyranny, war, foreign intervention, and prolonged occupation. The US
refusal to practice what it preaches when dealing with the Global South,
especially in the countries of the Middle East, vividly confirmed by its
complicity in Israel’s genocidal onslaught upon Gaza, remains a significant
precedent in relation to the policy debate about Ukraine, but it is far from
telling the whole story of the Iraqi ordeal of the past 80 years.
This remarkable book is written by Jacqueline and Tareq Ismael, both
highly respected Iraqi specialists who are longtime scholarly commenta-
tors on the sorrowful recent history of the country. They present us with
Forewordviii FOREWORD
a devastating critique of the American role in Iraq during the 20 years
since the ill-conceived aggression of 2003, but they do much more. Above
all, they convincingly explicate the comprehensive anatomy of victimiza-
tion that became the fatal destiny of Iraq and its people, climaxing with
the aggressive regime-changing war of 2003. The historical contextualiza-
tion of the war and the refusal to erase from political consciousness its
terrible impact on the Iraqi civilian population is what makes this book
such a powerful indictment of American foreign policy. The understand-
ing imparted by their analysis goes far deeper than typically superficial
assessments based on a simple model of ‘attack and occupation.’
Jacqueline Ismael, who sadly died earlier this year, and Tareq, her Iraqi-born
writing partner and husband, have long devoted their scholarly lives
to narrating the American desecration of Iraq. Additionally, they have
together built an ambitious academic infrastructure that has made major
contributions to Iraqi studies. These have included the founding of a jour-
nal, organizing international conferences, and publishing books. And per-
haps most of all, by developing an international community of scholars
committed to probing various less-known, yet integral, aspects of the
complex Iraqi experience of the last century. This high-quality scholarship
should not be confused with the one-dimensional output of Beltway think
tanks that offer the US government menus of policy options that are gen-
erally pleasing to the Pentagon and mainstream foreign policy venues. In
contrast, the Ismael orientation is objective, exhibiting and encouraging
others to undertake interdisciplinary styles of inquiry and assessment. This
work also valuably merges standard political and economic concerns with
serious attention to the social, ethical, religious, and even artistic and phil-
osophical dimensions of Iraq’s extraordinary cultural heritage. It is this
heritage that has been shattered by Iraq’s encounters with America in the
course of fragmenting the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.
In this necessarily last collaborative book, the Ismaels draw on their
superb qualifications to share with us their cumulative knowledge and wis-
dom about Iraq. This short but profound book manages to consider both
the disasters that have befallen Iraq but also the confused and sinister
behavior embedded in this pattern of dysfunctional US deployments of
hard and soft power over a period of six decades. What results is a highly
instructive book that contextualizes US geopolitical tactics and strategies
in a manner that sheds light on a host of other contemporary concerning
issues around the world. In essence, the Ismaels have managed to interpret
the interplay of America’s global and regional hegemonic ambitions inix FOREWORD
ways that yield a deeply informed narrative of the tragic events that have
ravaged Iraq and spilled over its borders to cause comparable forms of
distress elsewhere in the region. The book brilliantly depicts the intercon-
nections between the fate of Iraq and that of the Middle East as a whole,
presenting an illuminating account of why the impacts of the American
imperial agenda should not be conceptualized as mere aggression followed
by an occupation devoted to benign ‘state-building’ undertakings suppos-
edly aimed at constitutional governance and developmental dynamism.
With electrifying clarity, the Ismaels show that contemporary tragedy of
Iraq should not begin, as in most assessments with a focus on the two wars
in 1991 and 2003, their interim of harsh sanctions, and their chaotic after-
maths, but look at the downward spiral of events starting in 1963. The
book’s illuminating, mostly ignored or suppressed starting point is the
1963 CIA-facilitated coup that replaced the nationalist Qasim govern-
ment with the dictatorial repressive Ba’athist Party leadership, eventually
headed by Saddam Hussein. Tareq Ismael’s personal history of living in
exile ever since this coup and forever scarred by these events of 60 years
that culminated in the roundup and massacre of at least 5000 Iraqi intel-
lectuals and progressive. political activists, lends an aura of authenticity
and significance to these barely recollected events.
In a manner the 1963 coup in Iraq recalls the 1953 coup in Iran that
overthrew the Mossadegh government with the covert help and encour-
agement of the CIA, anticipating in several of its particulars the Iraqi
undertaking ten years later. In Iran, the Shah was restored to the Peacock
Throne, and more importantly, foreign ownership of the Iranian oil indus-
try was restored, with leading American energy corporations the greatly
enriched beneficiaries.
The true character of these events in both major oil producing coun-
tries was thinly disguised by then fashionable Cold War rationalizations of
saving these countries from a Communist takeover by marginalizing and
discrediting Soviet/Marxist/socialist influences that purportedly under-
mined Western strategic interests in the Middle East, as well as threatening
these countries with Stalinist futures. Such state propaganda, spread by an
ideologically subservient Western media, downplayed the true strategic
motivation for these disruptive political events, which was to keep the
energy reserves of the region under secure Western control while entrust-
ing their custodianship to the American oil industry. In this process, the
disregard for the sovereign self-determination rights of the state and suf-
fering of the peoples that followed was ignored as were the allegations thatx FOREWORD
the outcomes reflected the maneuvers of the CIA rather than the revolt of
nationalist forces. Only years later was the instrumental role of the CIA
widely confirmed. The original public rationale portrayed the events as
internally driven anti-Communist rejections of hysterical or tyrannical
leaders.
The book draws appropriate attention to the critical differences between
regime-changing interventions in the period between 1950 and 1990, and
those taking place after the Soviet implosion in 1991. Earlier efforts to
disrupt the politics of self-determination were hidden and covertly carried
out, and hence entrusted to the CIA and collaborating national elites in
countries targeted for regime change. The only overt exceptions of any
consequence during the Cold War occurred in the two wars taking place
in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam where international fault
lines were breached by the revisionist behavior of rival nationalist forces
seeking restored unification of the states as single nations. Elsewhere, the
United States tried to disrupt what it opposed by acting off-stage and rely-
ing on compliant national elements to construct the successor states.
After the Cold War the dynamic of intervention in the Middle East
became overtly militarist, tied to arms sales and predatory globalization.
The US sought to legitimize these overt interventions at the UN by claim-
ing humanitarian and international law justification or counterinsurgency
imperatives in the face of alleged terrorist threats. Among the rationaliza-
tions put forward in 2003 for violating Iraq’s state boundaries were its
possession of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a secret pro-
gram to develop nuclear weapons; Afghanistan after 9/11 as safe haven for
international terrorism; humanitarian urgency in Libya concerning the
beleaguered population of Benghazi. If UN legitimation was not granted,
as was the case with Iraq (and earlier Kosovo, 1999), then the US together
with allies proceeded to intervene openly, feeling no need for the secrecy
it relied upon during the Cold War. When the UN Security Council
refused the American request for authorization to use force in Iraq, George
W. Bush angrily suggesting that if the UN decided to withhold approval
of US war plans, it would find itself irrelevant. And regrettably, Bush was
to some extent right.
This overtness, also enabled prolonged foreign occupations, and in Iraq
was an alleged necessity to complete the challenge of liberating the coun-
try from its dictatorial past, which required ensuring that the successor
state was a stable and secure exemplar of constitutional democracy. The
only thing hidden from view in carrying out such state-building plans arexi FOREWORD
the various aspects of economic exploitation, including a forced entry into
neoliberal world economy.
This form of state-building by an occupying foreign power is half of the
abusive story exposed by this book. The other half has not been previously
explicated. What the Ismaels have managed to demonstrate through their
focus on the specifics of the American occupation is a set of policies that
had the intended effects of doing the opposite of what was claimed for
state-building. In actuality, the American occupation destroyed prospects
of a stable, competent, and prosperous Iraq, let alone a state protective of
human security and public order. The policies and practices systematically
pursued destroyed sturdy pillars of governmental stability that existed in
Iraq prior to 2003. The occupation purged the armed forces and bureau-
cracy of its Sunni highly professional staffing during the Ba’athist period,
turned a blind eye to the looting of museums and archeological artifacts
undermining cultural identity and national consciousness. Such an
approach gave ample political space to the assertion of a variety of sub-national
grievances and embittered rivalries among religious factions and
ethnic minorities. As the Ismaels explain state-building turned out in Iraq
to be state-ending, such a dismal assessment of the occupation manifested
itself through greatly increased ethnic strife, radical micro-politics, rising
criminality, gross corruption, persisting chaos, and increasing poverty.
It is for these reasons that ‘state-building,’ as argued by the authors, is
better conceptualized as a process of ‘state-ending’ or ‘state deconstruc-
tion.’ This is a radical claim that goes far beyond critiques of the conven-
tional understanding state-building as benevolence gone wrong with
Afghanistan and Iraq especially in mind. The shocking argument that the
Ismaels advance for our consideration is that this outcome was not a fail-
ure of occupation policy but a deliberately orchestrated success. The goal
of such an approach may seem perverse, but reflects American deep state
thinking on the Middle East, as strongly paralleled by Israeli beliefs and
practice, that the cornerstone of regional security is not so much a matter
of weaponry as it is in the existence of weak, internally divided and preoc-
cupied states.
In an informative chapter on the aspirations of the Kurdish minority
further concreteness is added to the exposition of how occupation mis-
shaped Iraq by showing that the US and Israel both promoted Kurdish
aspirations in ways that weakened Iraqi sense of national identity, so vital
for successful state formation projects.xii FOREWORD
The geopolitical hypocrisy of the American role in Iraq is given a bipar-
tisan slant that goes back to the Kennedy role in promoting the 1963 coup
against Qasim and forward to the efforts of both Bush’s to wage war
against their former client state, Iraq. We need to remember that in 1980
Saddam’s Iraq had been persuaded to attack Iran in what turned out to be
a grueling eight-year war, partly extended by US arms sales to both sides.
In addition, Saddam was given ambiguous signals a decade later by the US
ambassador in Baghdad about launching an attack on subsequent annexa-
tion of Kuwait, only to find Iraq subject to international denunciations by
the US President, Arab neighbors, and the UN as a legitimizing prelude
to a ‘shock and awe’ attack, and after another twelve years of punitive
sanctions that ravaged the civilian population of Iraq, yet another American
aggression launched against its former notorious ally who ended up pay-
ing with his life.
This mastery of the Iraq narrative by the Ismaels does what most Iraqi
commentators do not do. That is, they present dismaying evidence that
the wellbeing of the people of Iraq was consistently sacrificed as a sup-
pressed side-effect of this American quest for political and economic dom-
inance in the post-colonial Middle East. The story of Iraq serves as a
metaphor for the twenty-first-century US imperial (mis)adventures
throughout the entire world. To be sure, the region was especially vulner-
able to imperial design, and a result, has vividly exhibited this state-destroying
and people-victimizing behavior by the United States. This
reflects several factors: oil geopolitics as its supreme strategic priority,
Israel’s junior hegemonic status as its unconditional domestic priority, and
the blowback threats of Islamic radicalism and expansion of Islamic influ-
ence in the region after the 9/11 attacks have shaped its security dialogue
at least until the Ukraine War. We can be most thankful to have such a
book for its insight, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, and for getting
right the complex story of America’s role in Iraq.
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
_ Richard Falk
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Challenging Nuclearism: The Nuclear Ban Treaty Assessed
14 JulOn 7 July 2017 122 countries at the UN voted to approve the text of a proposed international treaty entitled ‘Draft Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.’ The treaty is formally open for signature in September, but it only become a binding legal instrument according to its own provisions 90 days after the 50th country deposits with the UN Secretary General its certification that the treaty has been ratified in accordance with their various constitutional processes.
In an important sense, it is incredible that it took 72 years after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reach this point of setting forth this unconditional prohibition of any use or threat of nuclear weapons [Article 1(e)] within the framework of a multilateral treaty negotiated under UN auspices. The core obligation of states that choose to become parties to the treaty is very sweeping. It prohibits any connection whatsoever with the weaponry by way of possession, deployment, testing, transfer, storage, and production [Article 1(a)].
The Nuclear Ban Treaty (NBT) is significant beyond the prohibition. It can and should be interpreted as a frontal rejection of the geopolitical approach to nuclearism, and its contention that the retention and development of nuclear weapons is a proven necessity given the way international society is organized. It is a healthy development that the NBT shows an impatience toward and a distrust of the elaborate geopolitical rationalizations of the nuclear status quo that have ignored the profound objections to nuclearism of many governments and the anti-nuclear views that have long dominated world public opinion. The old reassurances about being committed to nuclear disarmament as soon as an opportune moment arrives increasingly lack credibility as the nuclear weapons states, led by the United States, make huge investments in the modernization and further development of their nuclear arsenals.
Despite this sense of achievement, it must be admitted that there is a near fatal weakness, or at best, the gaping hole in this newly cast net of prohibition established via the NBT process. True, 122 governments lends weight to the claim that the international community, by a significant majority has signaled in an obligatory way a repudiation of nuclear weapons for any and all purposes, and formalized their prohibition of any action to the contrary. The enormous fly in this healing ointment arises from the refusal of any of the nine nuclear weapons states to join in the NBT process even to the legitimating extent of participating in the negotiating conference with the opportunity to express their objections and influence the outcome. As well, most of the chief allies of these states that are part of the global security network of states relying directly and indirectly on nuclear weaponry also boycotted the entire process. It is also discouraging to appreciate that several countries in the past that had lobbied against nuclear weapons with great passion such as India, Japan, and China were notably absent, and also opposed the prohibition. This posture of undisguised opposition to this UN sponsored undertaking to delegitimize nuclearism, while reflecting the views of a minority of governments, must be taken extremely seriously. It includes all five permanent members of the Security Council and such important international actors as Germany and Japan.
The NATO triangle of France, United Kingdom, and the United States, three of the five veto powers in the Security Council, angered by its inability to prevent the whole NBT venture, went to the extreme of issuing a Joint Statement of denunciation, the tone of which was disclosed by a defiant assertion removing any doubt as to the abiding commitment to a nuclearized world order: “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it. Therefore, there will be no change in the legal obligations on our countries with respect to nuclear weapons.” The body of the statement contended that global security depended upon maintaining the nuclear status quo, as bolstered by the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 and by the claim that it was “the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace in Europe and North Asia for over 70 years.” It is relevant to take note of the geographic limits associated with the claimed peace-maintaining benefits of nuclear weaponry, which ignores the ugly reality that devastating warfare has raged throughout this period outside the feared mutual destruction of the heartlands of geopolitical rivals, a central shared forbearance by the two nuclear superpowers throughout the entire Cold War. During these decades of rivalry, the violent dimensions of geopolitical rivalry were effectively outsourced to the non-Western regions of the world during the Cold War, and subsequently, causing massive suffering and widespread devastation for many vulnerable peoples inhabiting the Global South. Such a conclusion suggests that even if we were to accept the claim on behalf on nuclear weapons as deserving of credit for avoiding a major war, specifically World War III, that ‘achievement’ was accomplished at the cost of millions, probably tens of millions, of civilian lives in non-Western societies. Beyond this, the achievement involved a colossally irresponsible gamble with the human future, and succeeded as much due to good luck as to the rationality attributed to deterrence theory and practice.
NBT itself does not itself challenge the Westphalian framework of state-centrism by setting forth a framework of global legality that is issued under the authority of ‘the international community’ or the UN as the authoritative representative of the peoples of the world. Its provisions are carefully formulated as imposing obligation only with respect to ‘State parties,’ that is, governments that have deposited the prescribed ratification and thereby become formal adherents of the treaty. Even Article 4, which hypothetically details how nuclear weapons states should divest themselves of all connections with the weaponry limits its claims to State parties, and offers no guidance whatsoever in the event of suspected or alleged non-compliance. Reliance is placed in Article 5 on a commitment to secure compliance by way of the procedures of ‘national implementation.’
The treaty does aspire to gain eventual universality through the adherence of all states over time, but in the interim the obligations imposed are of minimal substantive relevance beyond the agreement of the non-nuclear parties not to accept deployment or other connections with the weaponry. It is for another occasion, but I believe a strong case can be made under present customary international law, emerging global law, and abiding natural law that the prohibitions in the NBT are binding universally independent of whether a state chooses or not to become a party to the treaty.
Taking an unnecessary further step to reaffirm statism, and specifically, ‘national sovereignty’ as the foundation of world order, Article 17 gives parties to the NBT a right of withdrawal. All that state parties have to do is give notice, accompanied by a statement of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ that have ‘jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.’ The withdrawal will take effect twelve months after the notice and statement are submitted. There is no procedure in the treaty by which the contention of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ can be challenged as unreasonable or made in bad faith. It is an acknowledgement that even for these non-nuclear states, nothing in law or morality or human wellbeing takes precedence over the exercise of sovereign rights. Article 17 is not likely to be invoked in the foreseeable future. This provision reminds us of this strong residual unwillingness to supersede national interests by deference to global and human interests. The withdrawal option is also important because it confirms that national security continues to take precedence over international law, even with respect to genocidal weaponry of mass destruction. As such the obligation undertaken by parties to the NBT are reversible in ways that are not present in multilateral conventions outlawing genocide, apartheid, and torture.
Given these shortcomings, is it nevertheless reasonable for nuclear abolitionists to claim a major victory by virtue of tabling such a treaty? Considering that the nuclear weapons states and their allies have all rejected the process and even those within the circle of the intended legal prohibition reserve a right of withdrawal, the NBT is likely to be brushed aside by cynics as mere wishful thinking and by dedicated anti-nuclearists as more of an occasion for hemlock than champagne. The cleavage between the nuclear weapons states and the rest of the world has never been starker, and there are absent any signs on either side of the divide to make the slightest effort to find common ground, and there may be none. As of now, it is a standoff between two forms of asymmetry. The nuclear states enjoy a preponderance of hard power, while the anti-nuclear states have the upper hand when it comes to soft power, including solid roots in ‘substantive democracy,’ ‘global law,’ and ‘natural law.’
The hard power solution to nuclearism has essentially been reflexive, that is, relying on nuclearism as shaped by the leading nuclear weapons states. What this has meant in practice is some degree of self-restraint on the battlefield and crisis situations (there is a nuclear taboo without doubt, although it has never been seriously tested), and, above all, a delegitimizing one-sided implementation of the Nonproliferation Treaty regime. This one-sidedness manifests itself in two ways: (1) discriminatory administration of the underlying non-proliferation norm, most unreservedly in the case of Israel; as well, the excessive enforcement of the nonproliferation norm beyond the limits of either the NPT itself or the UN Charter, as with Iraq (2003), and currently by way of threats of military attack against North Korea and Iran. Any such uses of military force would be non-defensive and unlawful unless authorized by a Security Council resolution supported by all five permanent members, and at least four other states, which fortunately remains unlikely. [UN Charter, Article 27(3)] More likely is recourse to unilateral coercion led by the countries that issued the infamous joint declaration denouncing the NBT as was the case for the U.S. and the UK with regard to recourse to the war against Iraq, principally rationalized as a counter-proliferation undertaking, which turned out itself to be a rather crude pretext for mounting an aggressive war, showcasing ‘shock and awe’ tactics.
(2) The failure to respect the obligations imposed on the nuclear weapons states to negotiate in good faith an agreement to eliminate these weapons by verified and prudent means, and beyond this to seek agreement on general and complete disarmament. It should have been evident, almost 50 years after the NPT came into force in 1970 that nuclear weapons states have breached their material obligations under the treaty, which were validated by an Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1996 that included a unanimous call for the implementation of these Article VI legal commitments. Drawing this conclusion from deeds as well as words, it is evident for all with eyes that want to see, that the nuclear weapons states as a group have opted for deterrence as a permanent security scheme and nonproliferation as its management mechanism.
One contribution of the NBT is convey to the world the crucial awareness of these 122 countries as reinforced by global public opinion that the deterrence/NPT approach to global peace and security is neither prudent nor legitimate nor a credible pathway leading over time to the end of nuclearism.
In its place, the NBT offers its own two-step approach—first, an unconditional stigmatizing of the use or threat of nuclear weapons to be followed by a negotiated process seeking nuclear disarmament. Although the NBT is silent about demilitarizing geopolitics and conventional disarmament, it is widely assumed that latter stages of denuclearization would not be implemented unless they involved these broader assaults on the war system. The NBT is also silent about the relevance of nuclear power capabilities, which inevitably entail a weapons option given widely available current technological knowhow. The relevance of nuclear energy technology would have to be addressed at some stage of nuclear disarmament.
Having suggested these major shortcomings of treaty coverage and orientation, can we, should we cast aside these limitations, and join in the celebrations and renewed hopes of civil society activists to rid the world of nuclear weapons? My esteemed friend and colleague, David Krieger, who has dedicated his life to keeping the flame of discontent about nuclear weapons burning and serves as the longtime and founding President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, concludes his informed critique of the Joint Statement by NATO leaders, with this heartening thought: “Despite the resistance of the U.S., UK and France, the nuclear ban treaty marks the beginning of the end of the nuclear age.” [Krieger, “U.S., UK and France Denounce the Nuclear Ban Treaty”]. I am not at all sure about this, although Krieger’s statement leaves open the haunting uncertainty of how long it might take to move from this ‘beginning’ to the desired ‘end.’ Is it as self-styled ‘nuclear realists’ like to point out, no more than an ultimate goal, which is polite coding for the outright dismissal of nuclear disarmament as ‘utopian’ or ‘unattainable’?
We should realize that there have been many past ‘beginnings of the end’ since 1945 that have not led us any closer to the goal of the eliminating the scourge of nuclearism from the face of the earth. It is a long and somewhat arbitrary list, including the immediate horrified reactions of world leaders to the atomic bomb attacks at the end of World War II, and what these attacks suggested about the future of warfare; the massive anti-nuclear civil disobedience campaigns that briefly grabbed mass attention in several nuclear weapons states; tabled disarmament proposals by the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s; the UN General Assembly Resolution 1653 (XVI) that in 1961 declared threat or use of nuclear weapons to be unconditionally unlawful under the UN Charter and viewed any perpetrator as guilty of a crime against humanity; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that scared many into the momentary realization that it was not tolerable to coexist with nuclear weapons; the International Court of Justice majority opinion in 1996 responding to the General Assembly’s question about the legality of nuclear weapons that limited the possibility of legality of use to the narrow circumstance of responding to imminent threats to the survival of a sovereign state; the apparent proximity to an historic disarmament arrangements agreed to by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986; the extraordinary opening provided by the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which should have been the best possible ‘beginning of the end,’ and yet nothing happened; and finally, Barack Obama’s Prague speech is 2009 (echoing sentiments expressed less dramatically by Jimmy Carter in 1977, early in his presidency) in which he advocated to great acclaim dedicated efforts to achieve toward the elimination of nuclear weapons if not in his lifetime, at least as soon as possible; it was a good enough beginning for a Nobel Peace Prize, but then one more fizzle.
Each of these occasions briefly raised the hopes of humanity for a future freed from a threat of nuclear war, and its assured accompanying catastrophe, and yet there was few, if any, signs of progress from each of these beginnings greeted so hopefully toward the ending posited as a goal. Soon disillusionment, denial, and distraction overwhelmed the hopes raised by these earlier initiatives, with the atmosphere of hope in each instance replaced by an aura of nuclear complacency, typified by indifference and denial. It is important to acknowledge that the bureaucratic and ideological structures supporting nuclearism are extremely resilient, and have proved adept at outwaiting the flighty politics of periodic flurries of anti-nuclear activism.
And after a lapse of years, yet another new beginning is now being proclaimed. We need to summon and sustain greater energy than in the past if we are to avoid this fate of earlier new beginnings in relation to the NBT. Let this latest beginning start a process that moves steadily toward the end that has been affirmed. We know that the NBT would not itself have moved forward without civil society militancy and perseverance at every stage. The challenge now is to discern and then take the next steps, and not follow the precedents of the past that followed the celebration of a seeming promising beginning with a misplaced reliance on the powers that be to handle the situation, and act accordingly. In the past, the earlier beginnings were soon buried, acute concerns eventually resurfaced, and yet another new beginning was announced with fanfare while the earlier failed beginning were purged from collective memory.
Here, we can at least thank the infamous Joint Statement for sending a clear signal to civil society and the 122 governments voting their approval of the NBT text that if they are truly serious about ending nuclearism, they will have to carry on the fight, gathering further momentum, and seeking to reach a tipping point where these beginnings of the end gain enough traction to become a genuine political project, and not just another harmless daydream or well-intended empty gesture.
As of now the NBT is a treaty text that courteously mandates the end of nuclearism, but to convert this text into an effective regime of control will require the kind of deep commitments, sacrifices, movements, and struggles that eventually achieved the impossible, ending such entrenched evils as slavery, apartheid, and colonialism.
Tags: denuclearization, Iraq War, militarism, Nonprliferation Treaty, nonproiferation, Nuclear Ban Treaty, Nuclear disarmament, nuclear weapons, nuclearism