Tag Archives: war

9/11 After 25 Years: Terrorism & War Transformed: ‘Just War’ rechristened as ‘The Great Terror War’

14 Sep

[Prefatory Note: this is a republication of Substack publication as an alternative way of remembering 9/11, essentially as a systemic tragedy legitimizing the state crime of state terror and demonizing political resistance to such criminality as validating retaliation under the rubrics of either counterterrrorism or a new revived species of pre-modern ‘just war.’ See <richardafalk5.substack.com]

25 years after 9/11 there continues to be well-evidenced doubts about the authenticity of the official version of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and an aborted mission to attack the White House. Such doubts have been ignored or more commonly dismissed by the mainstream media, derided as ‘conspiracy theory.’ This controversy remains to be resolved, and accompanied by continuing empathy for those families that suffered losses in the course of the tragedy. Whether the identity of the 9/11 perpetrators and their motives were as officially alleged or were motivated by a variety of strategic goals that have been attributed by critics to both adversaries and allies of the West is a matter of great unresolved lingering historical significance.

Yet what tends to be overlooked is an evaluation of the response, how it was crafted as ‘war’  rather than ‘crime’ and given a globalizing twist by generalizing the acts as an assault on the professed values of liberal democracy in the West without a hint of responsibility for the record of civilizational dominance achieved by colonizing violence, exploitation of resources, and coercive intervention with non-Western aspirations for self-determination. With a consciousness of this background, my focus is how the call to arms in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks reshaped warmaking as a core feature of international relations and geopolitical behavior that subtly undermined the UN and the role of international law in the management of global security. The most concise formulation of the original retaliatory formulation can be found in a rereading of President George W. Bush’s address to a Joint Session of Congress on January 20, 2001. From these perspectives, it seems persuasive to view as regressive the transformation of war and the nature of global security that represented, at least in part, a flawed interpretation of  the 9/11 phenomenon.

As the sitting president in 2001, George W. Bush, made clear in his address to Congress that there were immediate important alterations of U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps none more fundamental than demeaning the perpetrators as terrorists outside the domain of constraining elements in the law of war that had evolved over the centuries and then linking their attack to a global terrorist network. Beyond this, Bush raised the stakes by in effect declaring war on the vaguely depict global network rather than limiting the response to rendering what he deemed as ‘justice’ to the perpetrators. Several points of interpretation follow:

—the emergence of 9/11 mega-terrorism that was not a matter of warmaking directly attributable to a foreign state that made it permissible for the target state to retaliate with or without the permission of the sovereign state from which the attack emanated. This became through time an unchallenged de facto modification of the UN Charter conception of state sovereignty and a greatly expanded idea of justifiable self-defense not rooted in international law;

—the broader implication of this expanded right of retaliation meant that such a permissible use of force was not restricted to the territorial limits of the state from which the perpetrators were given safe harbor, were trained, recruited, and sent abroad to carry out the 9/11 mission. In other words, any sovereign state to which the perpetrators retreated whether by stealth or invitation could not insulate the suspected perpetrators from an enlarged right of retaliation, in effect creating a geographically unlimited permissible scope of retaliation quite independent of international boundary. This meant that retaliation or engagement in counterterrorist warfare imposed no framework of legal, moral, or even geopolitical constraint. In Bush’s words, “This is civilization’s fight,” referring to the unity of liberal values shared across all ethnic boundaries, without any overt hint of Orientalism beyond an implicit hint of a new phase of Pax Americana: “Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called upon to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.” Such a message made clear that unlike past wars, this war against terror because of its boundaryless nature would be a long struggle without the defeat of an enemy government, it cannot be ended until the terrorist network is destroyed, requiring patience and the active support of foreign nations.

—the characterization of the perpetrators of 9/11 as ‘terrorists,’ given the accompanying legitimation of the right of retaliation that transformed counter-terrorism into a new kind of ‘just war’ that was unregulated by either the law of war or international humanitarian law. [See Richard Falk, The Great Terror War for early evaluation] It treated such transnational political violence as ‘terrorism’ even if undertaken as a reaction to prior unlawful behavior by the targeted state, and gave states a policy justification for violations of sovereign rights as well as individual human rights. Detained individuals suspected of participating or complicit in such attacks were not accorded the rights of ‘prisoners of war’ but subjected to abusive forms of detentions, including torture, as ‘terrorists’ without denials or apologies from U.S. leaders.

—sovereign states were no longer free to proclaim their neutrality in relation to a sustained conflict between a violent transnational political movement and counterterrorist operations this was a unilateral revision of the right to remain neutral in relation to international warfare. Even during the two world wars and the Cold War the countries of the Global South were more or less respected if their governments opted for neutrality although subject to taunts by the John Foster Dulles, as U.S. Secretary of State that being neutral in the struggle against Soviet Communism was ‘immoral.’ Bush went further in the unipolar atmosphere of 2001 a decade after the Soviet collapse, declaring that “[E]very nation, in every region has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This is a grandiose demand that ends the option of occupying the neutral political space separating war and peace. Besides, it overlooks the obvious contradiction. The U.S. has long given support and asylum to ‘terrorists’ who support American foreign policy, most notoriously with respect to Cuba since the Castro-led revolution of 1959.

What is not evident in the U.S. response to 9/11 even after 25 years was the degree to which this pattern of transnational violence and counterterrorism represented a partial unconscious retreat to the pre-Westphalian idea of international relations as an anarchic domain where all pressures, including those derived from morality and religion, to constrain warmaking, protest POWs against abuse, and encourage peaceful resolution of conflict by diplomacy and judicial settlement procedures are abandoned when confronted by non-state political violence simply by calling such actors as ‘terrorists.’ Over time, rather than leading this unrestrained retaliatory violence, the U.S. has followed the Israeli lead that treats every act of resistance against oppressive occupation of the Palestinian homeland as ‘terrorism,’ sanitizing retaliatory violence as a deserving recipient of impunity regardless of policy context.

With the passage of time this counterterrorism paradigm for warmaking outside the limits of international law has been carried to genocidal extremes by the behavior of Israel toward the Palestinian people, characterizing recourse to violent struggle in their resistance to Israel’s lawless occupation as ‘terrorism,’ most unambiguously after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the word alone the issuance of a license not only to Israel for its genocidal response but also to validate the complicity of leading liberal democracies of the West. Indeed, any violence, whether by assassination of designated individuals or military assaults are described in the language of anti-terrorism as protective shields for lawlessness, immorality, and cruelty stripping away any pretensions of accountability.

The United States has also followed this Israeli path leading to the pre-Westphalian legitimacy of unprovoked wars of aggression best illustrated by the ‘wars’ against Iran in 2025 and more intensely in 2026. Although the justifications for recourse to war is tinged with the delegitimation of the Tehran government as ‘a terrorist regime’ reinforcing the closely related rationale of disrupting Iran’s supposed challenge to the Nonproliferation Treaty, which contains no enforcement measure against violators of NPT, and in relation to which the U.S. and Israel are the most blatant violating governments refusing the treaty obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament, and in Israel’s case the stealth acquisition of the weaponry through the connivance of Western liberal democracies.

In the decade about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War it seemed as if the territoriality of war as sustained political violence among antagonistic states would be restored. In this sense the 9/11 attacks ruptured such expectations, which were under pressure in any event due to Euro-American resolve to engage in aggressive uses of violence to prevent unwanted proliferation of nuclear weaponry as in Iraq, Libya, and of course, Iran. In important respects the war plans of nuclear weapons states are committed to engage in state terror of a planetary magnitude.

In conclusion, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks led to an irresponsible conflation of war with terrorism that has been applied in a manner that justifies Western acts of state terror while claiming to be engaged in counterterroristic ill-defined struggles civil society movements of resistance and resilience. This selective use of the language of ‘terrorism’ is what has greenlighted the violent practice and policies of governments of sovereign states while demonizing all acts or resilience, resistance, and liberation. Rather than restoring justice, as Bush claimed, it has spread injustice and personal tragedy a far greater number of victims that resulted from the 9/11 attacks, as well as discrediting the international procedures in place to promote justice. In this respect, it would be a mistake to discount the relevance of the U.S. Government’s hostility to the work of the International Criminal Court by the unprecedented behavior of imposing sanctions on its prosecutor, chief judge, and a number of its officials. This too is an aspect of ‘world order 25 years after 9/11.’

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Isreal, the United States Entrapped by Iran War of Aggression: The Quest for Real Peace

17 May

[Prefatory Note: The post below are my modified responses to questions posed by the Quds News Agency, a Palestinian youth journalistic network. The Iran War was widely rationalized after the fact as ‘a war of choice’ as if recourse to war continues to be a discretionary option in the 21st century. Iran’s resilience also suggests that non-defensive warfare is becoming a lose/lose venture in many contemporary situations, as well as radiating harm far beyond the national boundaries of the sovereign space that is the geographic locus of the combat zones, a sign of how interconnected the world has become with respect to reliable supply chains.]

  1. The Zionist regime is facing serious crises within the occupied territories, including internal disputes, reverse migration, lack of security, and psychological problems. As you know, the Zionist regime, in addition to the war with Iran, is also heavily involved in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. The Zionist regime violates the ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon on a daily basis. How do you evaluate these ceasefire violations and crises?

Israel, as led by the Netanyahu coalition adheres to an extreme version of Zionist ideology, which is committed to ethic supremacy for Jews, denial of Palestinian statehood in their own homeland, while pursuing expansionist river to the sea territorial goals by recourse to apartheid and genocide, with an outcome in Gaza of ecocide. Israel has been consistently defiant of international law as embodied in the 4th Geneva Convention on Belligerent Occupation as well as authoritatively enunciated by the International Court of Justice in a series of strong, highly professional legal assessments, supported by a large majority of the participating judges, including several from countries whose governments are complicit in many of Israel’s crimes.

Israel is paying an increasing reputational cost and pushback for these policies flagrantly in violation of international humanitarian law and universally shared ethical values. Israel has succeeded apartheid South Africa in becoming the leading pariah or rogue state in the world. Yet shamefully it continues to retain unconditional support from many Western liberal democracies, most prominently from the United States Government in an increased contested policy domains in which pro-Israel support is opposed by an emergent majority of the American people. In recent months it has been losing support from major European countries that had been complicit supporters of its genocide in Gaza.

Another way of viewing these developments is to observe that Palestine has already won the Legitimacy War for the high legal and moral ground in this encounter between the Zionist movement and the ancestral majority Arab population. In recent settler colonial situations the winner of the symbolic Legitimacy War has generally taken precedence over the battlefield military superiority of the colonial power. The French learned this lesson in Indochina and Algeria. The United States has unfortunately failed to learn a similar lesson from its experience in the Vietnam War. There is every indication that the Zionist leadership of Israel pays no attention to the relevance of the Legitimacy War in its policy calculations or to the outcomes of most political conflicts in the post-colonial world, where nationalist resistance has politically outlasted coercive foreign encroachments on territorial sovereignty that inflicts devastation and massive casualties but fails to overcome resistance until it finally withdraws in the face of combat fatigue and a rise in opposition in the metropole.

I believe that Israel faces a dismal future unless, as now seems unlikely, it repudiates Zionism, becomes a normal secular state, and respects international law and morality, and upholding with sensitivity in the context of the long suppressed Palestinian inalienable right of self-determination.

It is significant that genocidal settler movements enjoyed considerable political success prior to the adoption of the Genocide Convention of 1948 under the shadow of the Holocaust. The most spectacular examples are the breakaway white British colonies, above all, the United States, but less dramatically and more ambiguously, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that remained members of the British Commonwealth, yet dispossessed native populations with equal or even greater fury.

  • Many international analysts and experts believe that the United States and Israel failed to achieve their goals in the war against Iran, and Iran emerged as a new superpower. What is your opinion? To what extent do you consider Iran to be the winner of this war?

Iran is emerging from this aggressive war initiated by the US, joined by Israel, stronger and more respected, feared regionally and globally. Iran is hardly ‘a superpower’ except in the sense of showing great resolve in resisting foreign, geopolitically motivated intervention, and yet surviving decades of punitive actions by Israel and the United States. This makes Iran so far ‘the winner’ in this war started on Febuary 28th by its unexpected ability to completely frustrating the aggressors states in their efforts to gain a painless victory by devastating Iran sufficiently by its ‘shock and awe’ tactics to produce a qick political surrender. Additionally, for the second time in a year Iran has endured devastating violations of its territorial sovereignty causing severe losses to the people of the country as well as unwarranted harsh sanctions. The deliberate assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab causing an estimated 200 deaths at the outset of the war highlight the experience of a militarily one-sided war in which the aggressors are only indirectly and marginally subject to military retaliation. Such combat tactics underscored the unwillingness of the aggressor states to conduct their military operations in a manner that would facilitate a diplomatic off ramp from its gross miscalculations of Iran’s will to resist and capacity to inflect discrediting harm to the region and the entire world by its defensive option of closing the Strait of Hormuz to maritime traffic.

This unanticipated closure of Strait of Hormuz demonstrated the extent of miscalculation on the part of the aggressor states, causing widespread hostility to the war in the U.S., especially severe for the poor everywhere and countries dependent on supply chain reliability from the Gulf region for their energy and fertilizer needs. Such an economistic combat tactic by Iran has somewhat evened the balance in the struggle, although the United States and Israel have been spared retaliatory devastation and even major economic harm. It is likely that the outcome of the Iran War will send Western war planners to revise the tactics relied upon by the geopolitical pursuit of strategic interests.

  • Some media outlets are reporting on the Zionist regime’s moves to drag the United States into war against Iran again. What is your assessment? Will the US and Israel war against Iran resume again?

In the context of autocratic leaders such as Trump and Netanyahu it is hazardous to predict what course the future will take in relation to Iran. Trump has exhibited an inability to admit political defeat and has often managed to conceal his setbacks by wildly exaggerated claims of success as he did in the early days of the Iran War. He seems to have confused exaggerated early US reports of devastating losses inflicted on Iran’s military capabilities with a victorious political outcome. When the Iranians refused to play along, demonstrating retaliatory capabilities by strikes against US military bases in the region, and later by the Hormuz closure, Trump reacted with genocidal threats and crude expletives. When Iran still showed no signs of wavering, Trump backed off, but did not cease his bluff diplomacy by pretending the war was over and it ended with an American victory. At the same time, incoherently Trump continued to utter threats directed at Iran coupled with derisive comments about their diplomatic proposal to end the war permanently. Trump is a typical display of childlike pique called Iran’s politely conveyed proposal ‘totally unacceptable,’ and insultingly discarding it as ‘garbage.’ Quite characteristically, Trump offer no counter-proposal in accord with diplomatic protocol rather in a rhetoric associated with master/slave hierarchical relations.

Where this will lead is impossible to forecast, although the present stalemate does not make me hopeful about what lies ahead.

With respect to Netanyahu the situation is somewhat different. Since the October 7 attack on Israel border villages, Israel has pursued a policy of absolute security for itself, no matter the costs to other societies in the Middle East. Such a policy has led to sustained genocide in Gaza, unrestrained settler violence in the West Bank, the Gazafication of southern Lebanon, and an insistence on the pursuit of its own goals in Iran as distinct, and more farreaching, than those of the US. Israeli goals seek regime change in Tehran, the total abandonment of Iran’s nuclear program, and an end to positive relations with regional pro-Palestinian Islamic movements in the region.

From the experience in Gaza, we should at least learn that Israeli ceasefires operate, at best, as temporary deescalation moves rather than signaling the end of violence. I would be happily surprised if Israel refrains from resuming its war against Iran, with or without the US, which seems improbable so long as Iran emerges as a stronger regional actor than it was before February 28th.

If genuine peace is to replace Western hegemony in the Middle East it must include a process of genuine denuclearization starting with Israel, and concluding with the establishment of a multinational nuclear free zone throughout the Middle East, with compliance monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Accompany this imperative step would be the establishment of a regional framework that gave due participation to Palestinian representation and established mechanisms promoting regional development.

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World Order After 1945, After Vietnam War, and After Second Coming of Trump

3 Feb

[Prefatory Note: This post elaborates upon a lecture of mine on Janurary 26, 2026 at a webinar in a series convened and moderated by the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, which has kept alive the relevance of the Vietnam experience to current struggles. The invitation to me proposed the topic of ‘World Order After Vietnam.’ In this modified text I devote attention to the relevance of world order after 1945, as well as the Vietnam War itself, and subsequent developments.

One point of clarification: We speak of the Vietnam War rather glibly, which glides over the crucial reality that tragic abuse of power is better understood as ‘America’s War in Vietnam.’ Having noted this, I will stick by the standard terminology for the sake of convenience.

Feedback is particularly welcome as I intend to work further on this theme.

I welcome this occasion to be at virtually together with comrades in the Vietnam anti-war movement, and grateful to John McAiliff & Doug Hofsteter for this invitation, as well as Chris Appy who heads the Ellsberg Initiative at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for illuminating and lucid comments in his role as discussant. I had my doubts as to whether I could meet such a challenge. Part of my predicament in this talk recalled T.S. Eliot’s words to a NYC audience at the start of a poetry reading that I attended over 60 years ago: ‘I am reluctant to make any comments about my poems to an audience that knows more about them than I do.’ In that vein, I realize that there are many with us who have experienced the Vietnam and its aftermath with deeper experience and knowledge than I bring to this challenging topic.]

We are now living through a period of radical uncertainty with respect to the future of world order, an atmosphere agitated by the Gaza Genocide and Trumpism, the resurgence of geopolitical primacy and rivalry, prospects for radical modifications of modernity due to AI and related technological innovations, a transactional and narcissistic US leadership, a discredited  and weakened UN coupled with the emergence of cooperative international frameworks, a divided US versus a resurgent China, and a threatening conflict reality that is stimulating increased military spending, new modes of warfare, danger of warfare fought with nuclear weapons. A time of world order transition or rupture, from the end of the Cold War & US dominated unipolarity to a yet unknown future—What does this Trump phenomenon and the Chinese rise portend for the human future?

I think a few brief bullet points on world order before Vietnam would be helpful in giving some background to both changes and continuities relative to world order after Vietnam:

–World Order after WWII was designed by the winners, which defeated hopes for a peace system restraining hard power militarism, in accord with the precepts of political realism that understand international history as largely the story of military superiority and economic inequality as expressed  a favorite quote of hyper-realist through the ages, and recently by Henry Kissinger, and now Stephen Miller: “the weak do what they must, the strong do what they will.” Thucydides has been typically interpreted wrongly endorsing this cynical outlaw whereas more careful reading of the context of this adage suggests it is a prophetic warning that such Athenian corrupt behavior with respect to morality will lead to its downfall. The intention, contrary to the amorality of post-Machiavellian realism, was a counsel of moral self-constraint to those with power at a time when the prohibitions of international law did not yet exist.

 –the design of the UN could have worked had the winners of World War II acted with moral and now legal self-restraint: permanent veto rights for the winners, criminal accountability for the losers at Nuremberg, Tokyo; it is true that international law seems never to have been intended to displace the geopolitical management of global security by the architects of world order after 1945, but neither was its existence denied; the hope then was that at least the liberal democracies of the West (US, UK, and France) and their allies, would voluntarily exhibit respect for the contemporary code of law and morality as embodied in the UN Charter, and thus comply with international law and morality without burdening the Organization with enforcement duties that would have required a superior military capability even in relation to nuclear superpowers, which would have caused a different set of problems that have been identified by criticisms of world federalism as the solution to peacebuilding challenges.

–In retrospect, we should realize that even the leadership of liberal democracies could not be trusted to comply with international law or observe moral values if in tension with the pursuit of strategic ambitions or the supposed requirements of national security. As a result, it is understandable to blame the leading members of the UN, and not the UN, for its disappointing performance in relation to global security, genocide and ecocide prevention, human rights generally, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts. 

–Cold War excesses from the outset suggest wartime trust was dissipated even prior to the surrender of Germany and Japan: covert regime-changing interventions displacing elected leaders: Mosaddeq in Iran (1953); Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); political assassinations Lumumba, Castro Ché Guevera, attempts for both ideological and economic reasons; Soviet failure to hold elections in Eastern Europe and interventions to uphold the pro-Soviet status quo; see James Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK (2025) interpreting the corrupting impact of these violent killings on progressive politics in the US.

–death rattle of European colonialism but not delegitimized by the UN Charter or among conservative elite circles. The emergence of predatory globalization as legitimized by Clinton, Bush presidencies, neo-con influence favoring Huntington view of Cold War Islamic threat demonized as ‘terrorism’ and associated with Israel’s frontline struggle against suicide bombing reaching a climax in response to Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

The Pedagogy of the Vietnam War

         –Lessons learned by US foreign policy establishment (militarized bureaucracy; Think tanks)—avoid ground warfare & minimize US casualties, abolish the draft, manage media discourse; technological innovations; proxy war option (Ukraine: Biden-fight Russia by arming Uk & discouraging diplomatic compromise); pacify citizen activism; overcame ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ in Iraq War (1991)

         –Peace Movement failures: sedated by the ‘Vietnam Syndrome into ‘game over’ delusions, overlooking systemic character of the partnering of militarism, nuclear hegemony, capitalism and political leaders’ short-termism

Major Developments in World Order Since the Vietnam War:

         –Vital turning points: end of Cold War; 9/11, Al Qaeda, & Osama bin Laden; Great Terror War; Iraq War and occupation, 2003; rise of & rivalry with China; Ukraine War; Israel’s response to October 7; anti-woke, anti-immigrant politics in liberal West; Abraham Accords and geopolitical deference of Muslim-majority countries to US hegemony; reelection of Trump, 2024; inauguration of Zorhan Mamdani, 2026, ICE rampage, ecological and climate change neglect; global rise of authoritarianism, xenophobia and ultra-right nationalism; transformative technological innovations- AI, robotics, hybrid warfare.   

         –formal defeat of European colonialism, but not of colonial mentality, generating economic and security residual colonialism in Africa, imperial encroachments elsewhere

         –US reliance on economic warfare, principally through sanctions broadly applied and political destabilization; the current Iran Protest Movement

         –end of Cold War, Berlin Wall, the Gorbachev vision of a new world order & Russia’s decline, temporary withdrawal from geopolitical rivalry; neoliberal globalization and the deindustrialization of the US, heavy indebtedness, precarious finance-oriented hegemony through dollar after abandoning the gold standard;

         –Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ reliance on Israel to fight US proxy wars in the ME; Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilization’ hypothesis- containing Islam rather than USSR and left ideologies; Israel given a free hand in the region, as well as with Palestine (liberal societies swallow severe legal/moral wrongs of apartheid, genocide, ecocide); containing Islam—Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Muslim Brotherhood,  Egyptian coup; Huntington validated by 9/11 attack, Taliban, ISIS, Hamas.

         –US state-building ‘democratizing,’ containment p.us projects: Libya, Iraq (after 2003), Afghanistan, and now Venezuela; chaos, not democracy, state-destroying;

         –The anti-apartheid campaign contra South African racism, UN support and global solidarity via boycotts, divestments, sanctions;

         –The world order deficiencies as Israel intensifies repressive apartheid policies by recourse to  Gaza genocide, with West Bank spillover; discrediting of UN as weak, geopolitically neutralized, and most shamefully, a unanimous endorser of the Trump Plan in the SC 1803 (Nov. 17, 2025), given approval by SG, formation of Board of Peace at World Economic Forum, 2025;

         –US withdrawal from and hostility toward ‘internationalism’; started the year by withdrawing participation and funding from 66 international institutional arrangements-31 from within the UN System. These include the Climate Change Framework Convention, WHO, UNESCO; Board of Peace as shift toward what might be called ‘imperial internationalism;’

         –Rise and spread of authoritarianism, decline of rule of law internal to the state, from the Orban model to the rightest recent victory in Chile (some friction, Brazil: Lula over Bolsonaro; Trumpism; hard borders; realignment prospects.

         –US National Security Strategy 2025: Declaration of Imperial Internationalism

                  //Venezuelan attack

                  //US Western Hemisphere preeminence (challenging China’s trade and infrastructure diplomacy of mutual interests

                  //rejects liberal post-Cold War  

What Prospects for New Order

         –Spheres of Influence trilateralism 

        –Imperial Internationalism

         –End of NATO and alliance diplomacy; hard and soft power transactionalism; Europe as marginalized; a new state-centric world order

         –Rise of Regionalism and Civilizationalism (clash and alliance models)

–UN Reform or Collapse: a reset to moderate geopolitical influence, and restore confidence

–Functional Internationalism: cooperative global problem-solving mechanisms

–Polycentric Balance: Bandung-revived NAM; BRICS; Chinese Development Collective Framework

–Revolt against international payments system as tied to dollar: failure or success

–Extending US Imperialism: Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Cuba, Iran; and reactions- European realignment, heightened geopolitical rivalry

–Important global challenges: climate change, ecological instabilities; heightened risk of major wars

–key national challenges: reviving democracy and human rights; demilitarization and domestic investment in infrastructures, restored respect for truth and rationality, internationalism, prudent geopolitics; more equitable distributions of wealth and income, defeating the economics and politics of inequality

Concluding Remarks

–a time of radical uncertainty and unparalleled complexity; humility about forecasting the future;

–present world order precarious, unjust, militarized

–nuclear hegemony as geopolitical core of managing global security

–transactional statism versus civilizationalism

–hope, struggle, and the unknowable future

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Scientists form a Global Anti-War, Anti-Genocide Network: from Hiroshima to Gaza

7 Mar

[Prefatory Note: The post below is the slightly edited text of a keynote address to an organizational meeting for establish a worldwide network of Scientists Against War and the Destructive Use of Science as stimulated by the Israeli genocide against the civilian population of Gaza. This encouraging event of global scope occurred on December 9, 2023, some six weeks before the International Court of Justice issued its historic Interim Order on January 26, 2024 with a near unanimous vote supportive of the ‘plausibility’ of South Africa’s initiative undertaken in accord with Article IX of  the Genocide Convention to allow Parties to bring legal disputes as to the applicability of allegations of genocide to be resolved under the authority of ICJ. A video version of my talk is available: https://youtu.be/-kIb-NhVHiQ ].

I find the initiative that the organizing committee has taken in producing this Convention Against War and Destructive Use of Science: Scientists Against Israeli Apartheid, Occupation and Genocide to be a glimmer of light in a dark sky. A dark sky that is dominated by the most transparent instance of genocide in human history.

Where because of the capacity of worldwide media to show the daily unfolding of this terrible criminal action in Gaza and its related effects in the West Bank as well, the peoples of the world are exposed as never before to the concrete exposure of genocide in real time. Past genocides, even the Holocaust, have always been something relatively abstract from our consciousness, with its horrifying realities exposed long after the mass killing has stopped. This immediacy and unmistakable reality of the Gaza genocide, including the exposure of its sadistic details, intensifies the challenge to the collective conscience of humanity..  

What is happening in Gaza, it is not only a visible reality for the peoples of the world and the governments, the leaders and those in international institutions, it is also something that is reinforced by the explicit endorsement of such an approach to conflict as has been embarked upon by the leadership of Israel. Never has such a candid admission that one is striking against the people as a whole: cutting off their food and fuel and electricity, bombing their hospitals and places of shelter, targeting places where children and women gather. What is also shocking is that display of horror enjoyed the support and active complicity of several of the leading liberal democracies in the world. It suggests an imperial post-colonial posture toward the Global South in Western Europe and North America, which seems to be largely configured inter-civilizationally.

This Gaza onslaught is a dramatic horror story that makes this kind of transnational professionally grounded initiative against militarism so encouraging, a glimmer of light during dark times when many storm clouds hover close to planet earth. To oppose militarism all of its manifestations will hopefully become a dominant preoccupation of scientists and others, indeed for everyone with a global conscience to motivate them to feel that they must act responsibly in light of such developments that cloud the present and pose dire threats for the future..

Let me refer briefly to my experience with militarism and war-making. Having taught, as was said, at Princeton University for 40 years, I was surrounded by some of the world’s leading scientists including Robert Oppenheimer, John Wheeler, Murph Goldberger, and Freeman Dyson and others of global stature. What intrigued me then was the degree to which these outstanding scientists were enticed by the opportunity to take part in the security dimensions of government policy, which included feeding the militarist appetites of the private sector, exerting an unhealthy influence on public opinion, domestic politics, and a bloated bilateral peacetime military budget over the years by grossly exaggerating security threats and by the economically motivated projection of American power worldwide. This kind of toxic connection between scientists and government policy which is probably more extreme in both its character and effects in the United States than elsewhere.  being labeled by the US president ; the degree to which the US has the largest military budget and also is by far the largest arms supplier in the world, making it the largest source of military hardware and software among the national merchants of death. The US President, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about the dangers of ‘the military-industrial complex’ in his 1961 Farewell Address, a warning that to this day goes unheeded. Eisenhower’s words are worth recalling:

“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.” In actuality, the danger has increased in the last 62 years.

The other reinforcing experience I had was to visit the two leading nuclear strategic centers of global security policy, in the United States, and I take notice of two kinds of personalities that one encountered there. These were venues dominated by scientists.

One was a feeling that by contributing to the military development of weaponry and doctrine and so on scientists were somehow doing something in the “real world” and that this was a source of what struck me then as a kind of careerist excitement for them. And the other kind of scientific personality were people who didn’t know a great deal about politics but were indoctrinated into an unquestioning acceptance of the prevailing ideology of the time and were Cold War activists in a very superficial yet dogmatic way, This led them to believe that their work that consisted of helping with the development of weapons and the worst kind of weapons was something that was positive, that it contributed to a better world, both guarding the peace against the ideological enemy in Moscow and making the world safe for market-oriented constitutionalism.

In other words, ideology underpinned this enthusiasm for robust connections between the scientific community militarism that was broadly present in the society and very very salient, at least in the United States, throughout the entirety of the Cold War—and actually after the Cold War—because it saw the opportunity (with the collapse of the Soviet Union) to become the unipolar dominant presence in the world and didn’t have the imagination to choose anything other than the solidification of its military dominance as the path to establish and maintain its hegemonic role in international political life after the Cold. And this quest continues to guide American foreign policy despite rising resistance throughout the non-West. have focused on the United States partly because I know it best but also because I think it represents, in its own way, a powerful metaphor for the distortions that arise from this misbegotten marriage of militarism and knowledge as filtered through the brilliance of some of  the world’s finest scientists.

This kind of initiative, that you all are part of, is an overdue reaction. Perhaps the extremity of what’s happening in Gaza made many of us, regardless of professional orientation, to act in anti-militarist ways that we were not motivated to act before. It overcame a human tendency toward complacency and the feeling of helplessness about taking on these larger issues.

But I think that one of the revelations of this outbreak of genocide in Gaza is the helplessness of the formal structures of war prevention and the protection of peoples against abusive behavior. The UN, which was supposedly created as a war prevention institution after World War II, was, in a sense, designed by its founders to fail because it gave the five most powerful countries in the world the authority to block any kind of effective response that might oppose or neutralize militarism and aggressive and criminal undertakings in the course of war, epitomized by vesting a veto power in the winners of World War II.

This awakening from decades of indulging militarism which I think is happening in many domains, not just among scientists. I’m part of a parallel initiative of so-called global intellectuals that is similarly awakening to the fact that if the peoples of the world do not take responsibility, nothing effective will be done to curtail the menace of militarism and destructive warfare.

And so, this initiative among scientists is systemically important, giving rise that it strengthens over time, and does not dissipate when the current crisis subsides. .

There’s one other general factor that hasn’t often been taken into account, that despite this surge of militarism in the post-Cold War and present world: militarism hasn’t produced political results associated with costly investments in achieving military superiority nationally, regionally, and globally. In the post-1945 period, the large investments in military capabilities have proved in most combat zones to be dysfunctional. In a series of symbolic activities that sought to bring to bear military superiority as a way of controlling the political outcomes in Global South combat zones have ended in political defeat for the side controlling battlefield results. And the assumption of those that make foreign policy for almost all leading governments is that history is constituted by those that prevail in military conflicts. That, in other words, that war and militarism continue to have the same historical agency that in earlier times allowed  European colonialism to control most of the non-West.

But recent international experience defies that understanding and the US especially should have learned this by its decade-long experience in the Vietnam War. In that war  the US had complete military dominance yet lost the war. It is important to understand tat the lessons of that political defeat cannot be learned by these militarist governing elites. This is because there’s too strong a vested interest in persisting with the belief that military agency is what controls political outcomes and shapes history, a view that although contrary to experience continues to prevail in the coopted most influential media platforms throughout most of the world, reflecting as well the decline of independent media in even the most respected political democracies.

If Vietnam wasn’t enough of a pedagogic experience, then the 20-year commitment to state building in Iraq and in Afghanistan should have been a breakthrough that would encourage a more critical political consciousness in relation to military approaches to global security in the 21st century. But again, the energies of the militarist leverage within societies remained too strong to learn the lesson that in a post-colonial period of important powers, exhibited by persistent national mobilization in response to foreign intervention, that military superiority does not any longer produce favorable cost/benefit calculation. Any objective assessment of all the—not only the examples I’ve given—but Libya, Yemen, Syria, all of these venues of military intervention produced devastation, to be sure. But they didn’t satisfy the objectives of those who invested lives and trillions of dollars in achieving control the political outcomes, losing out both normatively and geopolitically as well.

Basically that’s a constructive reality, and it’s not just applicable to the United States. All the colonial wars with European states were won by the weaker side militarily. And that’s a terribly important lesson. Why it can’t be learned is because it would undercut the profitability of the arms industry and the power of the military within governmental bureaucracies. So what was done after the Vietnam War was not a matter of controlling involvement or the preparation for less militarist, more prudent forms of security, but instead the development of new weapons and the employment of scientists in that process, that is, the cure for the failures of militarism is to invest more intelligently and even more expansively in militarism, a seeming unbreakable cycle that is not susceptible to repudiation by repeated experiences of failure and moral/legal outrage. It will take anti-militarist pressures generated from within civil society, and hopefully achieving global scope and influence.

In effort to control the media during future intervention, the popular slogan in the US was that the Vietnam War was lost not on the battlefield in Vietnam but in the American living room. The idea was that the media would be more subjected to the discipline of a militarized political consciousness was accorded by a high policy priority by think tank and foreign policy elites..

Let me bring these remarks to an end by going back to the Gaza reality for a moment and saying that the Israeli practice there of genocide is in a sense a recognition of the futility of war as between two military capabilities. This is a war against people. And it’s a war that can be won only by the elimination or the dispossession of people. In that sense, it is a correct, perverse, and surrealistic recognition of the futility of conventional war as a way of shaping politics. It’s a horrifying reaction to that futility by resorting to an explicit avowal of genocide as the basis of Israeli security and territorial ambition in a sense, particularly applicable in contexts of settler colonial projects that to succeed must eliminate or totally marginalize the indigenous population, making even longtime residents, strangers in their own homelands.

So let me end by saying I applaud the draft Declaration, which I think is a very powerful document, and I hope that this initiative will lead to a worldwide process of anti-militarism and anti-war sentiment that will enlist powerful support from scientists and widespread respect from independent media, peace minded governments, and citizens of concern and conscience.

Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to speak at this important occasion.

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2 Aug

Poetry and War

 

During these days of continuing massacre in Gaza I have found it difficult to focus the mind elsewhere. I came across a short statement of about 200 words by the great, enigmatic 20th century poet, Wallace Stevens, stuck between poems in his Selected Poems, p.270, with a characteristically unemotional title—‘A Prose Statement on the Poetry of War.’

 

Stevens seems to be telling us that true poetry is a peacetime activity generated by the imagination while poetic responses to war are products of our consciousness derived from the domain of fact. In his words, “consciousness takes the place of imagination.” It is, to be sure, a special kind of consciousness, imbued with what Stevens refers to as the ‘heroic,’ and I would add, the ‘tragic’ and ‘unimaginable.’ We witness horror visually and viscerally, and yet we still too often rely on statistics about killing and dying to shape our sense of the gravity of all that is happening.

 

Stevens also reminds us that the imagination is not without its own ambitions, seeking to impart a sense of reality that supersedes the facticity of what Stevens is calling consciousness. Ambitions of this sort, situated in the hidden recesses of mental activity, also reflects the strong pull of desire, which if it challenges the prevailing images of what we might call ‘heroic fact’ generates severe feelings of hostility. It is a war zone of its own. Stevens alludes to “the endless struggle with fact” whether in peacetime or during a war, and adds, almost as a cautionary warning, “[b]ut in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.”

 

There is of course a haunting ambiguity in Stevens’ use of the word ‘we’ in this sense. Who are we? Does not our answer, usually not articulated, tell us how we join imagination to fact under the stress of war. The intensities of the ongoing violence in Gaza stifles the imaginative voice because the domain of fact becomes truly, even appropriately, overwhelming. Yet fact can be as victimized by subjectivity as the realms of the imagination, especially when it collides with desire. I think these days of those who would rationalize ‘massacre’ as ‘self-defense’ or dehumanize and demonize victims by branding ‘the other’ as ‘terrorist.’

 

While attentive to the terrible reality confronting us by the ongoing happenings in Gaza, we should strive for root causes. What is it about our world that allows the Guernicas, Auschwitzs, Hiroshimas, Srebrenicas to keep happening? How do we best identify this genocidal virus that keeps attacking the body politic, and yields tears, but no antidote? Is it the reification of ‘the other’ and of ‘the self’ that allows us to see mostly ‘villains’ and ‘heroes,’ and not children, women, and men? Up to now, we allow these lines of division to be drawn and to dominate the public sphere, and affirm partisanship as ‘realistic’ because the tensions of our world means that either I die or you die, and our leaders find good reasons for us to live and you to die. And so atrocity

begets atrocity, a ceaseless cycle with periods of calm and shifts of place, culprit, and victim.

 

In reflecting along these lines I am reminded of Theodor Adorno’s extraordinary comment—“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno’s meaning is not immediately evident, nor will it ever be. The cultural critic, Brian Oard, insists that the assertion must be read in its broader context, and in light of Adorno’s own later clarification that softens the specific injunction. If so approached, the statement is meant less literally than if read or invoked as an isolated indictment of what could be described as the indecency of any return to ‘cultural normalcy’ after the enormity of the crimes of the Holocaust.

 

What Adorno wants us to grasp is that Western culture that allowed Auschwitz to happen included its cultural artifacts, incorporating even the work and worldviews of poets in an overall totality that facilitates the grotesque. It encourages the coldness of indifference and helplessness in the face of the severe abuses of all those who fall outside the protective umbrella of our conscience.

 

Can we capable of learning anything at all from the corpses being drawn from the rubble of devastation in Gaza day by day? Is not the beginnings of a response, whether in the domains of imagination or consciousness, a refusal to embrace the moral and political delusions of sub-species identities, whether of nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, and civilization? Until the self merges with the other on a planetary scale, we will feel the pressure to avert our gaze from those crimes against humanity committed on our behalf or against those with whom we have no tribal or national identification. Is such an affirmation of species unity a dangerous utopian dream? We cannot know, but we should realize by now that the its rejection helps explain the recurrence of genocidal nightmares.     

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