[Prefatory Note: The text below is a somewhat modified text of an interview conducted by
Daniel Falcone, and published in Counterpunch on August 11, 2020. I am increasingly worried by the either/or quality of the U.S. November elections effectively suppresses concerns about
a bipartisan drift toward a second cold war focused on China as geopolitical adversary that will be confronted. Because it is desperately important to defeat Trump, with its fascist undertones, a view I share, the conventional wisdom of the moment is to wait with such concerns until Biden is safely in the White House. But suppose ‘later’ never comes!]
Nuclear Complacency and the Dangerous Drift Toward a New Cold War with China
- On this 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can you reflect on that moment historically and how it has shaped your view of American foreign policy since?
At the outset, I would point out that for me this is the saddest of anniversaries, and I try my best to avoid the use of the word ‘anniversary.’ I prefer ‘observance,’ which signals a certain solemnity in the course of acknowledging the occasion. Such an observance is not merely looking back as this weaponry has unfortunate continued relevance to human destiny after the horrifying events of 75 years ago.
It is also notable that the United States has never officially apologized for these unlawful attacks on heavily populated cities with no military significance in the closing days of World War II, nor even expressed public regret for the unprecedented suffering imposed on the Japanese civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a result of the atomic bombs, which was experienced as a deadly assault on the Japanese people as a whole. Barack Obama was the first sitting American president to visit the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park in 2016, but refrained from offering an apology, and directed his remarks to the future, affirming efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
As a frequent visitor to Japan I can testify that despite the extraordinary recovery made by the country after 1945 the national wounds inflicted by the bombing have not healed, nor can they heal so long as nuclear weapons are poised for use and relied upon by several countries for security.
As many specialists have argued, the principal motivation for dropping the two atomic bombs, grotesquely named ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ was not, as in the publicly proclaimed justification, to avoid the loss of American lives arising from an invasion of Japan, and so to bend the will of the Japanese leadership toward an immediate acceptance of the demands of ‘unconditional surrender.’ Historians increasingly agree that the overriding purpose was to send Moscow and Joseph Stalin a chilling message: don’t push the West too hard in negotiating European political arrangements after the defeat of Germany and don’t challenge the United States in relation to the spoils of war in the Pacific or your future might come to resemble that of these two devastated Japanese cities. In other words, the decisive motivation was geopolitical and not based on the only relevant international law justification, which required upholding a claim of military necessity in an ongoing war. Given the indiscriminateness of the devastation it would be highly doubtful that such a claim would be accepted by any impartial tribunal. Such a claim would be especially flimsy here as Japan had indicated through diplomatic circles that it was ready to submit to Allied terms subject to only one condition–that Japan be allowed to retain its emperor system. In the end, this condition was dropped by the victorious Allied Powers. This meant that the war could have been ended diplomatically without the atomic attacks. This also meant that the much relied upon pretext of the bombing being necessary to achieve ‘unconditional surrender’ was at best misleading, and more probably, simply false.
As indicated, a consensus among respected historians have concluded that the main idea behind the use of this weapon of mass destruction was to warn the Soviet Union, still a supposed ally, a country that endured as many as 30 million deaths in the common anti-fascist war effort. In retrospect the bombs were the opening salvo in an all-encompassing geopolitical rivalry that would last for more than four decades under the rubric of the ‘Cold War,’ This geopolitical confrontation diverted energies and resources from constructive uses as well as causing acute anxieties about the onset of nuclear war at crisis moments. It is a matter of conjecture as to whether the Cold War would have been the sequel to World War II if the atomic bomb had never been used, and instead unilaterally placed by the United States under strict and responsible international control as codified in a lawmaking disarmament treaty. Of all the roads not taken this may have been the most crucial one as it might have allowed post-1945 history to evolve in a less violent, more benign, manner, giving grounds for hopes to build world order around peace, justice, and ecological stability rather than rest the future of humanity on militarism and predatory capitalism.
Passing the 75th year since the bombs were dropped should remind us of another moral deficiency that has given a distorted shape to the nuclear age. The atrocities inscribed in world memory most vividly can be summoned to awareness by citing two place names: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Because Germany lost the war it was made to repudiate the Holocaust, pay reparations to Jewish and other death camp survivors, and join the front ranks advocating the criminalization of genocide. Because the United States won the war its atomic attacks on Japanese cities was never subject to political, legal, and moral scrutiny, let alone repudiated or properly commemorated, much less made subject to criminalization.
Despite the clear treaty obligation in Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to seek nuclear disarmament in good faith negotiations, a legal obligation unanimously affirmed in 1996 by the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion on the legality of nuclear weaponry, the United States and Russia retain large arsenals of nuclear weapons, backed by deployments and doctrines mandating use under certain undisclosed conditions. Seven other countries also have nuclear arsenals whose numbers, deployments, and doctrines of use are kept secret in many cases from even elected officials. This means that a sociopathic leader of these governments could make a snap decision to end life on the planet as we know it, and even an accident or mistake could change the course of global history.
There are many abhorrent features of the nuclear age that have not been given appropriate attention from its very outset. In the most dramatic possible way, it was demonstrated that losers in a major war will be held individually accountable by reference to international criminal law while the winners will enjoy absolute impunity.
The London Charter, also known as the Nuremberg Charter, setting forth the framework for the prosecution and punishment of surviving German civilian and political leaders was formally adopted on August 8, 1945, two days after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and one day prior to the bombing of Nagasaki. Such monumental insensitivity has never attracted the bitterly ironic commentary it deserves. There is not much doubt that had the Germans or Japanese developed an atom bomb and used it against Allied cities, and nevertheless gone on to lose the war, those responsible would have been prosecuted as war criminals, nuclear weapons criminalized, and a likely effect that this weaponry might never have been developed.
Such double standards were carried forward in the UN System by endowing the five winners in World War II with permanent membership and a right of veto in the Security Council, the only UN political organ with the authority to impose obligations as distinct from offering recommendations. Even during the pandemic, in the face of humanitarian appeals, the U.S. maintains unilateral sanctions meant to exert pressure on a range of. countries the governments of which it disapproves, including Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Zimbabwe. It is one more manifestation of the enforcement mechanisms used by geopolitical actors to impose their arbitrary and often greedy political will on weaker sovereign states. Such coercive tactics represent a defiant repudiation of the first principles of international law in contemporary state-centric world order: the equality of sovereign states.
With specific reference to nuclear weaponry this hierarchical and hegemonic character of world order is nowhere more clearly present than in relation to nuclear weapons. The countries that possess, develop, deploy, and deter, rely on threat diplomacy, and might at some point use nuclear weaponry remain internationally unregulated whatever form their reliance on nuclear weaponry assumes. In contrast, the more than 180 other countries in the world are legally and geopolitically prohibited from acquiring the weaponry however much under threat from hostile countries. Iran, threatened by hostile political actors possessing nuclear weapons, is geopolitically prohibited from acquiring such weaponry. These non-nuclear states face threats of aggression and occupation if seen as moving close to the nuclear threshold. Such a regime is illustrated by the experience of Iraq since 2003 or the pressures exerted on Iran.
Such coercive implementation of the nonproliferation regime runs contrary to the spirit of the treaty itself, which in Article X gives parties the right to withdraw from the treaty if ‘extraordinary events’ ‘jeopardize the supreme interests of the country.’ Withdrawal is achieved by submitting a notice three months in advance that specifies the extraordinary events. The geopolitical regime of counterproliferation ignores this sovereign right of non-nuclear states to determine their own security needs, including by the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The geopolitical regime possesses the features of ‘nuclear apartheid’ in which the dangerous nuclear weapons states are unregulated while the non-nuclear states are subject to the most coercive imaginable regulation that overrides basic sovereign rights. Additionally, the regime has not even been applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Israel’s covert acquisition of nuclear weapons as abetted by the complicity of France (documented in Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Option (1991)) was completely overlooked.
Reflection and commentary on all of these aspects of this 75th year after the initiation of. the nuclear age is as necessary in 2020 as it was in 1945, and yet remains more absent now than it was then when the moral triumphalism of victory in just war blunted critical discussion. Alarm bells are clanging but almost no one is listening, and those that could do something, seem more than content to do nothing. The overall public mood is now one of dangerous complacency, bordering on calculated indifference, while nuclear establishments around the world continue to go effectively and mainly covertly about their nefarious business. This includes undercutting any serious denuclearizing initiatives of world leaders, and includes even the occasional positing of denuclearizing visions by the leaders of the dominant states (e.g. Gorbachev, Reagan, Carter, Obama).
2) You recently stated that it’s never been more urgent that we repudiate nuclearism in all forms. What rationales or forms do proponents of nuclearism put forth?
It is important to view with skepticism the justifications offered by the governments of nuclear weapons states for retaining the weaponry, and to articulate the unacknowledged, yet true, rationale that relates to geopolitical status, leverage, conflict, and expanding the foreign policy options of leading nuclear weapons states. Secondary nuclear weapons states, including India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea are motivated by a mixture of considerations: regional rivalry, defensive security, and regional geopolitics. There are several different rationales given for retaining nuclear weapons that can be enumerated in distinct categories, but there exists the need to take account of operational variations in motivation and situation of each state that further reflects evolving conditions and varying leadership styles:
General Arguments:
–despite global tensions no nuclear weapon has been used since 1945, suggesting that the management of nuclear weaponry has stood the test of time;
–nuclear disarmament is not considered practical given this record of non-use, It is viewed by the governments possessing nuclear weapons and strategic discourse as more dangerous than management as abetted by prudent measures of arms control;
–leading nuclear weapons states rely on nuclear weaponry for defensive security via deterrence, and for geopolitical leverage in some global crisis situations.
Regional Arguments:
–the possession of nuclear weapons elevates the status of a country in world politics;
–regional hegemons and expansionist states rely on geopolitical leverage within geographical limits;
–beleaguered countries claim security imperatives to support their acquisition of nuclear weapons capabilities;
–international practices suggests that secondary states that do not possess nuclear weapons are more subject to military intervention than those that possess the weaponry (for example, Iraq, Libya versus North Korea).
The most explicit and unqualified overall rationale for nuclearism is set forth in the statement issued by the U.S., France, and the UK as to why these governments are unalterably opposed to the UN Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), stressing distrust of North Korea and others combined with a reaffirmation of confidence in the managerial capabilities of the NPT regime and collective security arrangements to continue to offer the best approach to the prevention of nuclear warfare. In effect the objectives of the TPNW are considered neither politically attainable nor a constructive contribution to world order. See response to Q-5 for more detail.
3) Can you comment on the most concerning geopolitical shifts or points of confrontation that are directly pertinent in this current age of autocrats?
The most serious geopolitical concern to rise to the surface relates to the increase of tension and hostility between the United States and China. This disturbing development that threatens a second cold war, with a mixture of similarities and rather distinct differences from the Cold War between the Western alliance led by the U.S. and the Soviet Bloc dominated by the USSR, and waged mainly on Third World battlefields and via ideological competition for hearts and minds in the West. In contrast, the emergent confrontation with China focuses on trade wars and friction between China’s claims of to a regional sphere of influence and growing technological superiority and the U.S. resolve to retain its globality, an extensive reality as the first global security state in history with even cosmic pretensions manifest in extending geopolitical rivalry including war preparations to space. In the background is the Thucydides Trap by which historical experience would seem to incline the U.S. to have recource to war to fend off China’s challenge to overtake the U.S. as the ascendant world power. We should also be nervous about what I call ‘the Clausewitz Trap’ by which ‘the fog of peace’ blinds powerful states to the benefits of peace, as well as to the terrible costs of war and the high costs of preparations for geopolitical war, which is raised to apocalyptic heights by risks of nuclear war. Unlike the Cold War, there was not present challenges of the magnitude or severity of the climate change crisis, which requires focused geopolitical attention which will be almost impossible to achieve if the U.S. and China end up with a confrontation comparable to that of the post-1945 Cold War.
The alignments of such a struggle for global ascendancy emphasize the secondary roles of India and Russia, as well as the diminished role of Europe as the geopolitical epicenter of geopolitical confrontation. Also, the West relied on ‘containment’ to address the supposed danger of Soviet expansionism, but can China be similarly ‘boxed in’ considering that its primary modes of expansionism have been based on soft power instruments, which have been economistic, as well as by providing win/win infrastructural assistance to vulnerable countries throughout the world, especially in Africa and Central Asia.
There are also significant shifts in geopolitical alignments at the regional level. In the Middle East, although commentary is fraught with uncertainty, the primary alignment of the Arab countries has shifted from antagonism toward Israel to Iran, with Israel becoming a tacit partner and coupled with U.S. backing. This has effectively marooned the self-determination struggle of the Palestinian people, leaving them more dependent than ever on their own efforts to resist Israeli occupation and annexation as reinforced by global solidarity initiatives such as the BDS campaign. It should be noted that this geopolitical shift from an anti-Israeli to an anti-Iranian focus is fragile, reflecting elite recalculations that ignore the continuing solidarity of the citizenries of the Arab countries with the Palestinian struggle.
The various Asian regions have also shifted their policy agendas due primarily to the greater regional assertiveness of China as well as the more geopolitically aggressive stance taken by India under the autocratic leadership of Modi. There have been several severe issues of human rights in Asia that have raised regional tensions and global concerns that are manipulated by the background of U.S./China confrontation: suppression of protest activity in Hong Kong, oppression of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang Province, genocidal treatment of the Rohingya by Myanmar, repression in Kashmir.
4) The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) website currently has their doomsday clock reading 100 seconds till midnight. This is a terrifying and unspeakable reality. What are your thoughts on the Bulletin as an indicator of possible nuclear war and devastation?
I believe the editorial consensus at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the most objective and informed assessment of the risks of nuclear war that is available, and should be accorded respect by the public, media, and political leaders. In this case grave concern as was expressed by moving the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than at any time since it was established in 1947, and is now placed at 100 seconds away from doomsday, that is, nuclear conflagration. In an unusual move signifying deep concern, the Elders, a group of global leaders established by Nelson Mandela in 2007 to promote peace, justice, and human rights, endorsed this challenge to nuclear complacency.
What prompted this august body to issue this ominous distress signal is worth pondering, and commenting upon. The BAS called attention to three developments: deteriorating efforts to seek stability via arms control, highlighted by the abandonment of agreements in the context of U.S./Russia relations, which is alleged to weaken nonproliferation barriers; failures to address adequately the challenges of climate change; disinformation technologies that have undermined trust in state/society relations. I would question whether this assessment is adequate as it ignores the greater relevance of nuclearism to militarized geopolitics and it does not refer to the greater risks of war arising from the most dangerous intensification of geopolitical tensions, especially U.S./China but also U.S./Russia. The prospect of geopolitical confrontation, entailing arms races and periodic global crises is greater now than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As the current preoccupation with the Coronavirus Pandemic has dramatized, diverting attention from the urgent need to address the menace of climate change, world order will be greatly undermined by a new cold war even if it manages to avoid any use of nuclear weaponry. The global policy agenda seems incapable of mobilizing systemic responses to more than one issue at a time.
5) Can you talk about anti-war organizations and peace groups around the world at the local, state, national, and global level that are working hard to ensure that a cataclysmic event is avoided? How has this work changed over time over the course of your career and what are the prospects for it impacting policy.
There are many civil society organizations around the world dedicated to peace with and without support from some governments. In line with my earlier responses, the overall geopolitical situation is giving rise to a warmongering global atmosphere that is more dysfunctional than ever from the perspective of humane values, including ecological stability. I would stress the troublesome reality that the U.S. global decline in legitimacy and capability has left Washington without the confidence or imagination to exert global influence except by relying on its military might, making threats, imposing sanctions, while flaunting international law and the UN that has included repudiating the most important recent instances of global cooperation with respect to climate change and Iran’s nuclear program.
The realities of geopolitical confrontation and nuclearism are overshadowed in public consciousness by the concreteness of immediate pressures associated with the pandemic, climate change, global migration, economic downturns, and autocratic patterns of governance. This has led to public complacency about nuclear dangers, making the work of the global anti-war movement more difficult at the very time that it has never been more necessary. This necessity flows not only from dangerous international developments but also from complementary national developments associated with the spread of autocratic leadership more disposed to seek militarist and nationalistic approaches to security, including choosing sides in the intensifying hostility between the U.S. and China, especially in the region surrounding China.
Civil society energies have been devoted in recent years to promoting the UN Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), seeking the 50 ratifications needed to bring the agreement into force among the parties. So far, 44 countries have ratified the TPNW, although when negotiated in 2017, 121 countries approved, with only The Netherlands voting against, and Singapore abstaining, and at the time 82 governments signed the agreement as a step toward ratification. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in 2017, and widely understood as a step taken in recognition of the significance of its worldwide efforts to encourage support for TPNW, and of the assumed importance of the treaty. We need ask the hard, somewhat uncomfortable question, ‘of what real impact will the TPNW if the nuclear weapons states oppose the treaty and are not bound by its terms?’
In view of the refusal of NATO countries to take part in even the negotiations of such an international agreement, and the issuance of a defiant statement of opposition by the U.S., UK, and France after the TPNW text was released, it has become evident that there is a fundamental cleavage in world politics between the nine nuclear weapons states, and especially the NATO nuclear powers, and most of the rest of the world. The NATO view implicitly affirms the permanence of nuclearism, resting its claims for stability and order on preventing further nuclear proliferation via the geopolitical implementation of the NPT regime to control non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons. For relations among states having nuclear weaponry, stability is achieved by relying on various forms of deterrence combined with the implementation of the nuclear apartheid regime.
It seems appropriate and timely to challenge this managerial approach to nuclear weapons, which actually supersedes the Nonproliferation Treaty, which called for reciprocal commitments to forego nuclear weaponry and to pursue in good faith nuclear disarmament. Instead the NATO managerial regime that emerged, has refused ever to consider nuclear disarmament as a policy option, refuses to validate the security claims of non-nuclear states facing dire threats, and claims a right of enforcement that contravenes the UN Charter and is not conferred by the text of the NPT. The illegitimacy and unlawfulness of nuclear apartheid should be a major focus of civil society activism and aspiration, but it should not be the whole story.
There are continuous developments that call for civil society initiatives, ranging from exerting pressure to seek verified nuclear disarmament, to opposing any resumption of weapon testing and the development of smaller nuclear weapons designed for possible battlefield use, to warning against costly and destabilizing nuclear arms races, and to exploring the connections between nuclearism and militarism.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
A Gathering Global Storm
24 Oct[This is a longer than usual post. It is my chapter contribution to The Great Awakenkng: New Modes of Thinking Amid the Ruins of Capitalism (2020) edited by Anna Grear & Davd Bollier. My text is preoccupied with the decline of the state as an efficient problem-solving instrument in a period where global scale challenges are generating an ethical-ecological-bio crisis. The intensity of the crisis is magnified by the absence of globally oriented geopolitical leadership, which had previously been supplied by the United States. Restored liberal internationalism would likely give more time to devise more functional responses to the gathering storm, but would not address the underlying structural causes of the crisis: predatory capitalism, global military, apathetic empathy, materialism.
I urge reading The Great Awakening and bringing the book to the attention of friends. It is an undertaking of love and commitment by the editors.
Punctum Books is a progressive, independent publisher. To learn more about its vision and the book go to its website, and check out links below:
the official press release about The Great Awakening, published by Punctum Books:
https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/the-great-awakening-edited-by-anna-grear-and-david-bollier
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-great-awakening-new-modes-of-life-amidst-capitalist-ruins/
….and here is where you can download a (free) PDF of the book:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42480]
Twilight of the Nation-State (at a Time of Resurgent Nationalism
The presence of systemic challenges in a world order reality that is sub-system dominant (that is, shaped by sovereign states, especially those that are dominant) has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. True, there is attention given to the advent of the Anthropocene, in recognition of the extent to which human activities are now principal drivers of important changes in the quality and even sustainability of the global habitat.[16] Yet problem-solving is still caught up in the structures, practices, and procedures of the Holocene, which dealt with habitat and security challenges by way of sub-systemic responses and policies that assume that crises could be devastating, but not threatening to the system as a whole.[17] In different ways, climate change and nuclear weapons are illustrative of the global challenges facing humanity in the age of the Anthropocene, but there are others— the protection of biodiversity, eradication of poverty, the prevention of hunger and malnutrition, and the control of pandemic disease.
From a conceptual perspective, climate change is a clear instance of the limits of statist problem-solving in circumstances where the global scope of the problem is acknowledged. The unevenness of state responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases, which is aggravated by the difficulty of establishing causal connections between emissions and harm, creates controversy and tensions. With a strong consensus within the community of climate scientists and among civil society activists, the governments of the world came together to negotiate an historic agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to minimize increasing harm from global warming. The result was a notable achievement: 193 governments signed onto the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015, and there resulted a celebration among the participating diplomats. Yet the success of the Paris Agreement, as measured by maximizing the cooperative potential of a statist problem-solving procedure, was, from another point of view, an ominous failure. The Agreement, although impressive as an exercise in inter-state lawmaking, was disappointing if the measure of success was prudently addressing the challenge. The Paris Agreement was neither responsive enough to the dangers nor sufficiently obligatory to provide a credible and responsible response to the dangers of global warming if measured against the limits on CO2 dissemination urged on governments by the overwhelming majority of climate specialists.
Until ten years ago, the idea of a statist twilight was seen mainly as a recognition that the state, as it had evolved in Europe since the seventeenth century, was being displaced transnationally by economic globalization and was newly threatened by transnational mega-terrorism and cyber attacks.[26] At the same time there was an emerging awareness that the most manifest threat to human wellbeing was being posed by the effects of global warming brought about by the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The recent confrontation between North Korea and the United States, which has featured apocalyptic threats from the leaders of both countries, has reawakened the world to the dangers of nuclear war and to the fragility of existing global security arrangements.
Overall, the increasingly global scope of policymaking and problem-solving was regarded as making it dysfunctional to rely on state-level governance and calculations of national interest. This is because the items on the political agenda most likely affect the totality of lives and the collective destiny of humanity—especially future generations—regardless of where one is situated on the planet.[27] Revealingly, these globalizing concerns have not led governments to create stronger structures of global governance. The dangerous inability to protect at-risk global and human interests might have been expected to induce more responsible governments and their citizens to work feverishly to establish a more independent and adequately-resourced United Nations, but this failed to happen. Addressing global challenges successfully seems impossible without augmented instututional capabilities backed up by the level political will required to generate and implement appropriate legal norms. [LR1] Whether and how these norms will be delimited is a major adaptive challenge to a fundamental realization that the Westphalian framework, even if responsibly reinforced by geopolitical leadership—which is presently at low ebb—cannot satisfy minimum requirements of world order. It is a disappointing part of these dire circumstances that there is such a weak popular mobilization around this twenty-first-century agenda of challenges. It is time to acknowledge that, despite the seriousness of global challenges, states separately and aggregately have shown little ability, and inadequate political will, to respond in a manner that is adaptive.[28] In effect, the non-decline of the state, or even its seeming resurgence as an exclusivist nation-state, is accentuating the weakness of global governance when it comes to global, systemic issues. In this respect, the state continues to bask in sunlight, as if awaiting twilight to subdue its anachronistic orientation and priorities.
Instead of a rational and convincing pattern of adaptation, this rendering of a radiant twilight has produced a series of institutional innovations that were supposed to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of multilateral cooperative arrangements on world affairs. This gave rise to such diverse arenas as the G-7, G-8, G-20, annual gatherings of the IMF and World Bank, BRIC meetings, Shanghai Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as to private sector initiatives such as the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Such constellations of institutional configurations contribute to the impression of organizational decline, as does the emergence of a variety of anti-capitalist initiatives associated with the World Social Forum, Non-Aligned Movement, including commoning in various forms.[29]
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States chose to constitute itself as the first “global state” in history, relying on a network of hundreds of foreign bases, navies in every ocean, and the militarization of space and even cyberspace, aiming to establish a global state that eclipsed the sovereignty of all other states, which are unwilling to dilute the traditional scope of their sovereign rights when it comes to national security (except to some extent China and Russia).[32] This American global state relies on the consent of many, and on coercion toward a few, in pursuit of its goals. This is most clearly evident in relation to the conduct of counterterrorist warfare and counter-proliferation diplomacy, using non-territorial innovations such as drones, cyber sabotage, special ops elite covert forces, as well as relying on traditional territorial instruments of hard power such as military intervention. Such a heavy investment in achieving globalized military control is also seen as supportive of neoliberal capitalism, it also tends to downgrade the relevance of the Westphalian state to either of its prime roles— in relation to development and to internal and external security.[33]
In addition to war, the dense causal complexity of global warming, in terms of the locus of greenhouse gas emissions being substantially disconnected from the locus of harm, offers another kind of deterritorializing in which ecological security depends on the behavior of the global whole as well as on that of certain national parts. Related issues of biodiversity pose analogous issues in relation to the global dependence on on diversity being out of sync with the territorial sovereignty relied upon to preserve the world’s most biologically diverse rainforests.
[1] Emblematic of this zeitgeist was the first World Forum organized by TRT World (a Turkish English-language radio and TV channel similar in format and intent to CNN or to Al Jazeera English) around the theme of “Inspiring Change in an Age of Uncertainty,” featuring several world leaders, prominent media personalities, government officials, and even a few academics, including myself. Hotel Conrad, Istanbul, October 18-19, 2017. No one took issue with this theme, which would never have been chosen in the last half of the twentieth century when the structure of international relations, at least, seemed stable, if not certain, and hardly worth problematizing.
[2] The linearity of the metaphor can also be questioned and subjected to doubt in this chapter. The degree of certainty that night will follow twilight does not pertain in the political domain where reversibility and stagnancy could persist, that is, the state could recover its salience or at least achieve a new stasis.
[3] This is the central argument of Richard Falk, Power Shift: On the New Global Order (London: Zed, 2016).
[4] On the U.S. providing a global leadership that achieves many of the positive goals associated with world government, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as a World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
[5] For an understanding of the scale and scope of past catastrophic change see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
[6] Richard Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?” in Falk, Power Shift, 253-262.
[7] We perceive the future “through a glass, darkly” if at all, which provides ample reason to rely on an epistemology of humility to sustain hope. That is, since we cannot know the future, we should strive for what is necessary and desirable. This view is elaborated upon by Falk, “Horizons of Global Governance,” 101-128.
[8] Among recent instances, Scotland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Catalonia are of relevance. For an analysis of the international issues in the political and historical context of the 2017 encounter of Spain and Catalonia see John Dugard, Richard Falk, Ana Stanic, and Marc Weller, The Will of the People and Statehood (report at the request of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 30 October 2017). For a focus on the conflictual aspects of internal struggles to reshape the dynamics of self-determination see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 2012).
[9] See Richard Falk, “Ordering the World: Hedley Bull After 40 Years,” in The Anarchical Society at 40: Contemporary Challenges and Prospects , eds. Hidemi Suganami, Madeline Carr, and Adam Humphreys (Oxford, UK: Oxford Un iversity Press, 2017), 41-55, in geopolitical sequel to role of “Great Powers.” On role of Great Powers, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1977).
[10] See Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy: Change and Persistence in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Hants, UK: Edward Elgar, 1992).
[11] Most extravagantly expressed by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Even Huntington’s far more accurate anticipation of renewed conflict was based on a new era of inter-civilizational rather than inter-state warfare, see: Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). Both of these influential formulations can be read as alternative expressions of the twilight hypothesis. For a negative assessment of economic globalization as shaped by neoliberal ideology see Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).
[12] For discussion see unpublished paper, Richard Falk, “After 9/11: The Toxic Interplay of Counterterrorism, Geopolitics, and World Order,” presented at a workshop on “Is there an After After 9/11?” Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, January 20-21, 2018.
[13] There was some thinking along this line, most explicitly by Robert D. Kaplan, Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000); also, Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, but Fukuyama’s twilight is followed by the presumed forever sunshine of globalized liberalism.
[14] Perhaps the most graphic assertions along these lines were made by the American president, George W. Bush, shortly after the 9/11 attacks: “We have the best chance since the rise of the nation state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Further, “[m]ore and more civilized nations find themselves on the same side, united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos:” Address to the Graduating Class, West Point, June 2002; also, in the cover letter to National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, Washington, D.C, September 2002.
[15] Most significantly argued by Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[16] See Richard Falk’s chapter, “The World Ahead: Entering the Anthropocene?” in Exploring Emergent Thresholds: Toward 2030, eds. Richard Falk, Manoranjan Mohanty, and Victor Faessel (Delhi, India: Orient Black Swan, 2017), 19-47.
[17] These terms used to classify geological eras are here used metaphorically to identify the scope of problems and problem solving in the context of global governance.
[18] See the text of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2015) to discern its essentially voluntary compliance framework. “Paris Agreement,” New York: United Nations, 2015.
[19] Trump has not yet formally expressed objections to the Paris Agreement beyond suggesting, in vague generalities, that it is “a very bad deal for America” and hurts the competitiveness of American business by raising costs of production via constraints on carbon emissions.
[20] The climate change policies of California are a dramatic example, accentuated by the anti-environmental posture of the Trump presidency. Individuals and communities may voluntarily adopt climate-friendly behavioral patterns including vegan diets, electric cars, solar power.
[21] See “nuclear famine” studies. There are also other indications of toxicity and disruption of ecological and social structures on a more or less permanent basis. For human impacts via food see the briefing paper by Ira Helfand, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk: Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition,” Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2013.
[22] For elaboration see Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path to Nuclear Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Danger (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012).
[23] Even when a cautious call for steps toward a world without nuclear weaponry is set forth, as by Barack Obama in his Prague Speech of 2009, nothing happens as the roots of nuclearism are too deep to challenge effectively.
[24] See Richard J. Barnet, Who Wants Disarmament? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) for a strong early critique of disarmament diplomacy that publicly advocated disarmament while bureaucratically opposing it. Over the decades, nuclearism has become entrenched in the governmental structures of the main nuclear weapons states that have been identified as the “deep state” or “military-industrial-complex.”
[25] See Richard Falk. “Challenging Nuclearism: The Nuclear BAN Treaty,” Global Justice in the 21st Century, July 14, 2017; “Nobel Peace Prize 2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)”, October 8, 2017, https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/nobel-peace-prize-2017-international-campaign-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons-ican/
[26] For speculation along these lines see Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2003).
[27] For stimulating conjecture along these lines, see Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill, ed., Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[28] See Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”—raising the biopolitical question as to whether there is a sufficient species will to survive as distinct from individual, communal, and national wills to survive that are robust, and actually, part of the distinctive problem of superseding and complementing responses at lower levels of social integration by reliance on species and global scale responses.
[29] See also the networked adaptation to the new era as depicted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[30] The idea of nationality is purely juridical, given practical relevance by passport and international identity papers. In some countries, for example Israel, the state draws a distinction between citizenship and nationality, privileging the latter on the basis of Jewish ethnicity.
[31] The Trump presidency has illustrated the dynamic of the double coding of nationalism and love of country. For Trump’s white political base, the acclamation accorded to America is understood in a non-plural white-supremacist manner, which terrifies and angers those Americans who are non-white or socially vulnerable. It raises the critical question as to what is “America” as state and nation. Such interrogation should be directed at many states that are trying to build various forms of exclusionary governing structures. These issues are well explored in Mazen Masri, The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2017).
[32] This sense of establishing a global security system administered by Washington was most clearly put forward during the presidency of George W. Bush in the National Security Doctrine of the United States of America (2002): see advice to China to concentrate on trade, and not waste resources competing with the U.S. in the domain of security.
[33] The “Westphalian state” should be contrasted with the “global state” constructed by the United States, as well as with the concept of “empire.” See generally: Richard Falk, The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), especially 3-65; also Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”.
[34] For instance, overseeing the negotiation of several multinational agreements, including the Law of the Seas Treaty in 1982, and generally seeking to combine its national interests with sensitivity to the interests of others, but still largely within a state-centric imaginary.
[35] See Gill, Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership.
[36] See Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation State: Citizens, Tribalism, and the New World Disorder (London, UK: HarperCollins, 1994) somewhat prophetically arguing that the future will witness the decline of the state due to the rise of anti-internationalist values and political movements.
[37] Not explicitly formulated in Robert J. Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, rev. 2nd ed., 1991).
Tags: global leadership, global militarim, nuclearism, predatory capitaalism, state system, ultra-nationalism\