Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
PROF. LOUIS RENÉ BERES
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” -Soren Kierkegaard
Roman god Janus is depicted looking in two directions at once. So, too, should Americans position themselves for better understanding the unique challenges of world politics. Among other things, this means acknowledging the importance of national political transformations while recognizing the primacy of non-political changes.
It’s not complicated. America’s core problems can never be fixed by politics. No organ or promise of government – no president, no congress, no hyper-adrenalized assurance from Democrats or Republicans – could halt the virulent trajectories of this nation’s Trump-accelerated decline.
Though opportunities and obligations to reform the political sphere remain important and available, such residual lifelines would be limited. In essence, taken by themselves, no eleventh-hour political options would be capable of reversing the country’s tangible drift toward incivility, instability and irremediable chaos.
How did we get to such a bitter place? Correct explanations are necessary and unhidden. Driven single-mindedly by considerations of personal wealth and presidential self-promotion, our egocentric system of American governance has now incubated a toxic amalgam. From this paradoxical fusion of plutocracy and mob rule, no promising national or international benefits ought ever to be expected.
To explain further, details will matter. Looking “forwards,” resolute candor will be a required starting point. In the end, America’s governance problem is not about personalities, parties or ideologies. Rather, it’s about something always-underlying, and always insidious. It’s about a stubbornly proud culture of American illiteracy.
As Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers were already well aware, the Republic requires authentic education and literacy. While the vast majority of Americans certainly know how to read, this same sizable segment chooses not to read anything of importance. In the current White House (at least those structures not yet demolished to make way for ballroom dancing), President Donald Trump remains openly indifferent to legal and historical foundations of the United States. In his preferred definition of national culture, this self-declared head of the “Trump-Kennedy Center” now plans to bring cage-fighting to the White House.
There is more. As evidenced by Trump’s justifications for violating Venezuela’s sovereignty with armed force (the United States is an original party to the United Nations Charter, a multilateral treaty of the United States), this president wittingly ignores Article 6 of the US Constitution (the Supremacy Clause) and multiple US Supreme Court rulings. Following William Blackstone’s 18th century Commentaries on the Laws of England, international law has always been part of US national law.[1] Ipso facto, when Trump launched his unilateral military operation against Venezuela, abducting that country’s president, he was acting against American law as well as international law. This is the case even if Nicolas Maduro was a tyrannical and drug-dealing head of state.
How did the United States manage to reach such a defiling and self-destructive moment? In reply, allegations of far-reaching American illiteracy are anything but false or hyperbolic. We Americans now inhabit a feverishly breathless nation, a dissembling country where virtually no one attempts to pause the grinding machines of political manipulation or to engage with intellectually challenging thoughts. Today, this machine is led by a president who not only eschews the written word wherever it is informed, clarifying or instructive, but draws substantial public support for his loathing of intellect, science, and law. As to matters of justice, prima facie, Donald Trump displays only blatant indifference and callous disregard.
Significantly, Trump’s injurious loathings are neither disguised nor hidden. Amid a profoundly anti-intellectual American culture, this president’s lack of educational, legal and historical interests has often emerged as an enormous political asset. Accordingly, we should finally ask, “Could any single datum of human governance be more humiliating or more perilous?” Is this a president we could rely upon during nuclear crisis dealings with Russia, North Korea, Iran or China? Though plainly illegal, any US use of force to “acquire” Greenland could be taken by China as an authorizing incentive to “re-acquire” Taiwan.
On his patently lawless and jumbled claim to take over Greenland (“We need Greenland” is offered as sufficient justification), Donald Trump has several-times asserted his right to all military options. In a worst-case but increasingly plausible scenario, the United States would come to blows with Denmark and other NATO countries, an unprecedented conflict in which the United States would de facto ally itself with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Should this once-unimaginable narrative be occasion for worry? Isn’t it absurd? Credo quia absurdum, declared ancient Roman philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”
There is much to be done. To wit, Americans must be analytic; more precisely, the nation’s leadership should look Janus-like – in two directions at once. But what could be expected from any directional benefits of “mind?” Warned Joseph Goebbels in 1934: “Intellect rots the brain.” Bragged presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016: “I love the poorly educated.”
Though distressing, these declarations have meaningful historical commonalities. Moreover, while many Americans remain content with fleeting hopes to successfully tackle “affordability” problems or grow personal wealth, even the richest citizens feel themselves deprived. Resigned to a dreary future of exhausting and unsatisfying work and the absurd prospect of fighting utterly gratuitous wars, even the most “successful” Americans still have to coexist with unmanageable despair.
It is hardly surprising that “no vacancy” signs hang prominently outside America’s medieval prisons and that the nation’s opiate crisis is attributed to criminal drug trafficking from “shithole countries.” But truth is always exculpatory. For the United States, the real fentanyl problem is not Venezuelan supply, but American demand.
To repair a broken country, candor, intellect and an uncharacteristic grace will be necessary. For the moment, “We the people” are not motivated by any meritorious calculations of human value, factors that Greek philosopher Plato identified as “virtue.” In general, we Americans don’t seek paths to courage, equanimity or “balance.” Instead, we meekly accept frenetic presidential commands to follow disjointed lives of obeisance, submission and incoherence.
Whatever is being decided in politics, Americans are now carried forth not by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “high thinking and plain living,” but by sorrowful eruptions of fear and agitation. At times, at least, “We the people” may wish to slow down and “smell the roses,” but our battered and battering system of governance imposes upon us the merciless rhythms of ritualistic conformance.Left unchecked, the predictable end of this mind-deadening delirium will be more institutionalized criminalized governance and more uncontrollable international war. In an increasingly likely narrative, such a war would become nuclear and the corresponding weakened world system system would descend into chaos.
Ironically, we Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, “We the people” possessed the potential to nurture individuals to become more than a servile “crowd” (Soren Kierkegaard), a shapeless “mass” (Carl Jung) or a docile “herd” (Friedrich Nietzsche). Then, Emerson had described Americans as a people guided by Platonic “virtue” and Jeffersonian “self-reliance.”
No longer!
In any final calculus, credulity remains America’s most refractory foe. Our always-willing inclination to believe that personal and societal redemption must lie in politics represents a potentially fatal disorder. To be sure, many critical social and economic issues do need to be addressed by government and elections, but so too must our deeper problems be solved at the individual citizen level. By definition, before we can fix the macrocosm of national governance, we will have to fix the microcosm of individual “personhood.”
Looking backwards and living forwards, Americans should finally understand that Donald Trump is not this country’s “true” pathology, but only its most humiliating symptom. We suffer from a much deeper illness. This illness (19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would call it a “sickness unto death”) is a lethal disorder of whimsical irrationality and determined anti-reason. Ipso facto, to rescue the Republic, it will not be enough to rid the United States of its flagrantly lawless president. It will also be necessary to overcome a long-term national mind-set that favors the demeaning entertainments of “mass” over the refined challenges of “mind.” If we are worried about “doomsday” (and we should), we ought not to seek rescue by “superheroes.”
It’s high time for intellect-backed candor. America will never be saved by cinematic fantasy figures or by elections. Like the Roman god Janus, US citizens now need to look backwards and forwards at the same time. At this eleventh hour, only such a comprehensive view could point both citizen and citizenry toward viable survival options. No other insight could possibly be more urgent.
[1] International law is a part of US law. On this incorporation, see especially art. 6 of the US Constitution (“The Supremacy Clause”) and the Pacquete Habana (1900). In the words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring).
About the Author:
LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth and most recent book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016) (2nd ed., 2018) https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy Some of his principal strategic writings have appeared in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard University); Yale Global Online (Yale University); Oxford University Press (Oxford University); Oxford Yearbook of International Law (Oxford University Press); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (Pentagon); The War Room (Pentagon); World Politics (Princeton); INSS (The Institute for National Security Studies)(Tel Aviv); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); BESA Perspectives (Israel); International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Atlantic; The New York Times and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
