[With North Korea in the news again for hurling missiles around the periphery of Japan, I thought this old essay might strike a chord. It first appeared at the old Palace Of Reason on October 24, 2003 -- FWP]
This past week, while rummaging through his private library, sorting books into "to remain shelved" and "attic bound" categories, your Curmudgeon stumbled across an old Robert Heinlein story, one of his oldest, whose title he's appropriated for this essay. It concerns a fictional post-World War II regime in which a farsighted American military man drives for -- and achieves -- a world state, held together by a nuclear monopoly. That state is manned exclusively by Janissaries, each having taken an oath to preserve the peace of the world. Since their loyalty is to the commander of that nuclear monopoly, he is, in effect, the military dictator of Earth.
The story's protagonist finds this solution to the problem of weapons of mass destruction unsatisfactory. He proceeds with it solely because, within the context of the story, no preferable alternative exists.
Heinlein wrote that story in 1941, friends.
The problem of WMD is far worse today than ever before. The great analysts of the early postwar period could not have foreseen our current situation. For example, Bernard Brodie argued in The Absolute Weapon (1946) that the A-Bomb was geostrategically the Ace of Trumps, and would remain so, since it could be used to preclude the development of any comparable or superior weapon. Nor did any of his colleagues do better. (Gregg Herken covers the strategic thought of Brodie's time in his fine book Counsels Of War.)
The closest anyone has come to foreseeing our current plight is physicist / futurist Eric Drexler, who, writing in the mid-1980s, conceived of the potential of nanotechnological weapons that would threaten all of humanity -- and that would be within the technological and financial reach of ordinary individuals. Dr. Drexler didn't find a solution, either -- indeed, if a solution to the advent of cheap, easily made planet killers is even conceivable.
We will soon witness the birth of two, perhaps three new nuclear states: North Korea, Iran, and possibly Saudi Arabia. The first two are on the verge of ascent to nuclear status through research and development; Saudi Arabia is rumored to have made an oil-for-weapons deal with Pakistan, though these reports are not yet confirmed. All three developments portend near-term calamity.
The menace of a nuclear armed North Korea, a poverty-stricken Communist gangster-state willing to trade weapons for hard currency, should be obvious by now. Hardly less so is Iran, whose ruling mullahs have openly proclaimed that, were they to come into possession of a nuke, they would use it against Israel. As for Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda's principal source of funding, militant Wahhabi Islam, and Islamic terrorism worldwide, the prospect of a "mislaid" Saudi bomb should be just as scary.
Up to now, we've been very lucky. The disintegration of the Soviet Union raised all sorts of unpleasant possibilities, but none of them materialized. These three new terrors are much worse. The Soviets had a strong interest in stability; Pyongyang, Tehran, and the Islamist maniacs supported by the Saudis do not.
In the era of "non-state actors," no palatable solutions present themselves.
Steven Den Beste argues for the revival of the old "blackmail is a bomb" policy, that treats the threat of nuclear assault as equivalent to the assault itself, and prescribes massive retaliation in response to it. But that policy only works when the brandisher of nukes is itself a state, well delimited in space, and can be unambiguously identified as such. Of course, the same observation applies to the actual use of a nuclear weapon. If we were struck but could not trace the attack unambiguously back to a government, what would we do next?
Had Black Tuesday involved, not a quartet of stolen airliners but a nuclear explosion in Manhattan, and had al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the act, what would America have done? Would the president have struck Afghanistan with nukes? Would the American people have endorsed such carnage?
If you regard those outcomes as dubious, you're not alone.
Is it time to try Heinlein's "unsatisfactory solution" in the form of an American World Empire, so that we can control the manufacture, transport, and use of all weapons anywhere? Your Curmudgeon can't see it. Apart from the practical difficulties of subjugating six billion people spread over 50 million square miles of land, the overwhelming majority of whom have no tradition of rights and no love for the American concept of democracy, it is inconceivable that the resultant peace would be, in Ralph Peters's words, "a peace worth having." The unprecedented power the Empire would possess would be a magnet for all the megalomaniacs in the world. Inevitably, they would rise to the top -- given enough time, the worst always do -- and the word "freedom" would vanish from the human lexicon.
There is a third approach, midway between passivity and empire. America could extend the rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom to its logical conclusion, and declare that it will preemptively strike any state or "non-state actor" that seeks mass destruction capabilities. We could become the Spartans of the Third Millennium: armed to the teeth, constantly on high alert, and flexed to go to war whenever and wherever a threat appears.
This approach would combine the disadvantages of passivity with those of a world-girdling empire. Eventually, given imperfect intelligence, someone would sneak a nuke or a bioweapon past us. We'd have to militarize just as thoroughly as if we intended to conquer the world. And we'd lose our freedom just as surely.
A time approaches when no one on Earth will be safe. Whether WMDs pass into the hands of homicidal maniacs willing to die if they can kill a swarm of their "enemies," or a world state so powerful that it can suppress all such traffic emerges from our current asymmetric multi-sovereignty order, the man who wants only to sit under his own vine and fig tree faces a terrifying future.
Earth is no longer room enough.
Robert Frost said a “A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Well, a corollary to that is that there is no advantage that Western liberals will not surrender to savages.
ReplyDeleteThe do that because they lack simple foresight and would rather serve some vague, airy fairy goal that will never be attained. Demographic realities, for example, guarantee that whites will be overwhelmed and become a minority in their own countries. Fact. This is as certain as that a spot of gangrenous tissue on a living organism will grow larger.
Certain realities of life will, in fact, be vigorously denied by the liberal, which denial will involve yet more egregious attacks on the bedrock principles of the West. Suicide in service to delusion. Gigatons of pixels are used up each day to try to draw idiots back into the circle of some kind of rationality but it's a hopeless exercise. I go back to Solzhenitsyn's idea of the armor around men's minds which will only be broken by "the pitiless crowbar of events." That armor is in place and only the starkest, most tragic operations of reality will reorient people. Forget rational argument. Watch Tucker deal with some of his guests. It has to be seen to be believed.
Soaring public debt is the least of our problems or perhaps simply the apotheosis of every major problem we have. It funds all, and I do mean all, manner of activities that fly in the face of millennia of human history. Create a permanent parasitic class, destroy the family, gleefully slaughter the unborn, and invite foreigners into your midst? Why not? But it's the rare politician who looks into the near future. And, anyway, he knows no one is the least energized on this point.
Nothing could have been done to prevent large countries from obtaining nuclear weapons without engaging in what you were hoping to avoid. That peace not worth having. That Pakistan was allowed to acquire nuclear weapons is probably the beginning of the end of geopolitical reality where the civilized world had to factor in dealing with primitive and corrupt states. Perhaps it even simpler than that. Modern warfare as seen in WWI showed what pathetic beings the Western elites were. Hideous slaughter. Man is probably just incapable of self-control and rationality in the realm of human relations.
Whatever firmness and foresight might accomplish at this moment, it's clear those are qualities in short supply. Instead of the U.S., China, and Russia developing an entente, we have idiot Europeans in our camp who are fanatically dedicated to giving their lands away to savages, a disease from which we suffer too, alas. And we ourselves are fixated by trivialities and stupidities that make the Europeans look sane, not the least of which is the elites' dishonest advancement of the "Russian collusion" and "Russian threat to world peace" propaganda efforts. Statecraft, yo.
So any kind of a rational world order is completely out the window. We don't even understand our own laws and culture so what we might have to propose to the Chinese or Russians won't be much more valuable than an exhortation to get plenty of exercise. In fact, that would be more valuable than anything a Western leader could propose to the world. Consider it the upper limit of Western usefulness.
Does anyone have an update on the Melania footwear crisis?
Unfortunately, I'm too old - and too poor - to emigrate off-Earth. My hope is to make it possible for my grandchildren to take advantage of the opportunity, should it arise in time.
ReplyDeleteShort-term - I really do not see an alternative to:
(1) intercepting any missile launched, and sending one back at the originator - whether or not that country officially sent it, or whether a rogue group did
(2) Use of force against the states that will not reign in their missile-throwers.
Will that hurt innocent people? Yes. But, that is a better solution than to surrender to tyranny.