Abstract: Scholars and diplomats have traditionally identifiedpower as the driving goal of states and empires. Generally ignored, however, is that operationally-useful definitions of power are problematic and that the ultimate form of power in world politics[1] is “power over death.” To acquire this consummate power, national and terror-group leaders have sought the “death” of “others.” This predatory search has been marked by an ironic reciprocity: Each state or terrorist group struggle for the death of certain designated “others” – a struggle with roots in the primal promise of religious sacrifice – offers a palpable defense against individual and collective annihilation. In the end, this destabilizing reciprocity reveals that the overriding rationale of Realpolitik[2] or geopolitics is not acquisition of territory, wealth or military victory, but personal immortality. In the summarizing language of Heinrich von Treitschke’s Lectures on Politics (1898): “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.”[3]
“History is an Illustrious War Against Death.”- Jose Ortega y’Gasset, Man and Crisis (1958)
True Meanings of War and Peace
In Man and Crisis (1958), Jose Ortega y’Gasset identifies core meaning of war and peace. Though “an illustrious war against death” is both vague and inconsistent with conventional definitions, it can still set the stage for much deeper understandings. In essence, waging “war against death” reflects a timeless human search for immortality,[4] but acquiring “power over death” also demands the killing of many “others.”[5] From the beginnings of humankind, the number of “others” has literally been incalculable.
Though the issues are complex and intersecting, they can never be solved by any nation’s political, financial or business leaders.[6] They can never reasonably expect resolution by “mass society.” Nonetheless, the connections will finally need to be acknowledged and challenged.
There are many pertinent details. To acquire manageable “power over death,” individuals (microcosm) and states (macrocosm) make tangible preparations to bring fatality to variously selected “enemies.” At times, especially in the Islamist Middle East, these belligerent preparations involve faith-based notions of “martyrdom.” Portentously, as we may learn from the evening news, these notions call not “only” for war, but for terrorism and/or genocide.[7] Significantly, the pertinent harms are often intersectional or synergistic, not mutually-exclusive. By definition, where synergies are involved, the “whole” injurious outcome is greater than the simple sum of its “parts.”
There are multiple subsidiary details. In world politics, the planned mass killing of other human beings displays an endlessly ominous provenance. Conceptually, this killing is often comparable to religious sacrifice, an ancient human ritual oriented toward a presumptively life-saving deflection of death to “others.”[8] But what are the current implications of this deflection for durable global stability? What can these implications tell us about Israel and Iran; post-Assad Syria; Russian aggression against Ukraine and US President Donald Trump’s belligerent notion of “America First?”
Dedicated thinkers, both strategists and policy-makers, should examine the largely-inconspicuous links between microcosm and macrocosm, between the individual human being and the world political system in its entirety. Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote succinctly of “not being dead” as the best exemplar of ascertainable power. Confronted with what Canetti called “terror at the fact of death,” humankind – individually, and collectively – seeks one particular advantage over all others. This incomparable advantage is “to remain standing” while others must “lie down.” Inter alia, any global security system based on nuclear threat and counter-threat – i.e., a system of nuclear deterrence – is based upon this bifurcation.
Over time, such a system is virtually destined to fail. In the end, this bifurcation need not bewilder. Fundamentally, it merely reveals that those who can remain upright, albeit temporarily, are those who will be “victorious.”[9] In essence, victories could be declared because still-standing persons, states or sub-state terror groups have “managed” to divert death to “others.”
The conclusion obtains for all “players.” Whether macrocosm or microcosm, the situation of physical survival represents the central situation of ultimate power. But as belligerent nationalism makes durable survival more and more problematic, Realpolitik or power politics effectively deprives states of their most genuine power “lever.”[10] This can become especially apparent when the lever is linked to unprecedented or sui generis threats of nuclear deterrence.
Westphalian Origins of World Politics
For strategists and policy makers, history deserves pride of place. The modern world political system was created at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.[11] Left unmodified, the “all against all” Westphalian process (most basically, a dynamic of threat, counter-threat and war) will mandate continuously adversarial inter-state relations or magnify existing adversarial interactions. It will also encourage state enemies to enjoy certain “microcosmic” triumphs that would otherwise remain concealed. These triumphs reference the deeply-satisfying human emotions experienced by persons confronting other human individuals who are preparing to “lie down.”[12]
In world politics, the ultimate acquisition of power is never really about land, treasure, or conquest. It is about presumed victory over death, a personal triumph, one described by philosopher Heinrich von Treitschke that stems from certain unique prerogatives of national sovereignty.[13]
The not-always logical reasoning here is still straightforward. When the “macrocosm” (“my state” or “my revolutionary organization”) is powerful, goes the argument, so am I (“the microcosm”). At some point, when this collective player seems ready to prevail indefinitely, I too am granted a personal life that is unending. In this fashion, the “immortal” state or terror group creates the “immortal” person.
Such abstract ideas can be daunting to even the most capable students of world politics. To feel such conceptual reasoning in palpable fashion, Leni Riefenstahl’s film celebration of Der Fuhrer, The Triumph of the Will, could serve scholars best. Reminding the viewer of Hegel’s egregious aphorism, this legendary film underscores something extraordinary: On planet earth, a nation-state can become the “march of God in the world.”
Until now, neither the United States nor its enemies have been able to understand this linkage. As a result, all nation-states continue to be driven by policies that bring them neither personal satisfaction nor institutional safety. All they can continue to expect in a threat-based world of Realpolitik is perpetual war, terrorism and genocide. In the best of all possible worlds, humankind – recalling the ancient creed of Epicurus that death fear is foolish and irrational – would pay close attention to this one following query:
What is death? A bogy. Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done with.”[14]
Death as a Zero-Sum Event
In general, states fail to understand that death is typically identified by their most recalcitrant enemies as a zero-sum event. For these states, anything done to sustain an adversary’s national survival would represent a more-or-less intolerable threat to their personal lives and personal power. Reciprocally, anything done to eliminate such hated enemies would enhance their own collective existence and augment their own collective power. Ideally, as we may learn from history (and from singer/songwriter Bob Dylan), these strategies will fare best whenever we can compete “with God on our side.”[15] Seemingly, because of the intimate associations between macrocosm and microcosm, the reciprocal life advantages of death and dying can be enjoyed doubly.
“Normally,” even if only at a subconscious or reflective level, the living person never really considers himself/herself more powerful than at the moment he faces a dying person. In these circumstances, as we may once again learn from Elias Canetti, the living human being comes as close as he or she ever can to encountering the feelings of personal immortality. In roughly similar fashion, the “living” nation-state never regards itself as more powerful than at the moment when it confronts the impending “death” of a despised enemy state. Only slightly less power-granting are those sentiments that arise from confrontations with a “dying” enemy state. This means essentially the same sentiments experienced by a belligerent state that is seeking tangible “victory” over another state or states.[16]
In both cases, personal and collective, convention, good taste and skilled statecraft require that zero-sum feelings about death and power be suppressed. Such polite feelings ought never be flaunted. However, they do remain vital and determinative.
There is more. In world politics, power is so closely attached to a hoped-for conquest of death (national and personal) that variously core connections have been overlooked. As a partial result, students and practitioners of international relations continue to focus mainly on epiphenomena, on easily recognizable ideologies, identifiable territories, tangible implements of warfare (this involves arms control and disarmament) and the still-obscured intricacies of nuclear deterrence. The problem is not that these factors are unimportant to power and survival, but that they are of a shadowy, secondary or reflected importance.
Nuclear deterrence in particular should be rendered subject to continuous re-examination. But before there could be any purposeful “rethinking,” scholars would first need to refine the still-underlying conceptual bases of Westphalian anarchy. These bases reflect a “horizontal” or decentralized system of international law, a system wherein civilized international relations are effectively contingent upon life in a global “state of nature.”
During a war, any war, the individual soldier, a person who ordinarily cannot experience satisfyingly tangible power during peacetime, is offered a unique “opportunity.” Accordingly, the pervasive presence of dead bodies in war cannot be overlooked or minimized. Rather, it is a central and clarifying fact of belligerency, one necessarily antecedent to all subsequent deterrence-related calculations.
“Normally,” the soldier who discovers himself surrounded by corpses and knows that he is not one of them is imbued with a radiance of invulnerability. This palpable sense of immortality, of monumental and plausibly incomparable power, would then “spill over” into any further calculations of threat and counter-threat. Such calculations could include assorted threats of nuclear deterrence.
Normally,” the state that commands its soldiers to kill and not to die experiences great power at the removal of a formidable collective adversary. This surviving state, much like the surviving individual human warrior, is transformed, indisputably and correspondingly, into a potentially primal source of everlasting life. Such abstract observations are hardly fashionable among general populations or political leaderships; they could even appear barbarous and uncivilized. Still, for now at least, scholars should be seeking to more accurately describe such critical behaviors.
To understand the expanding risks of nuclear deterrence, thinkers and planners should be prepared to look behind the daily news. Truth is always exculpatory. Though true observations may sometime seem indecipherable or objectionable, they remain true nonetheless.
In an apparent paradox, some of America’s non-state enemies also seek to “remain standing” vis-a-vis the United States, to seek power in the presumptively life-or-death struggle against a despised “other.” One must say “apparent paradox” here because some of America’s terrorist enemies seem not only unconcerned about being able to “remain standing,” but seek to die themselves as “martyrs.” In these exceptional but worrisome cases, it would appear that the perpetrators often actually do “love death.”[17]
What is most important to understand by these sub-state calculations is that “to die for the sake of God” is to not die at all. By “dying” in a divinely commanded act of killing presumed enemies, the jihadist terrorist does seek to conquer death by “living forever.” Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.”
For the most part, the “love of death” described by jihadist terrorists and certain others is the ironic consequent of an all-consuming wish to avoid death. Since the death this enemy “loves” is temporary and temporal, leading “in fact” to a permanent reprieve from real death, accepting it as a tactical expedient becomes easy. If, for any reason, the usually welcome death of an individual engaged in “holy war” were not expected to ensure authentic life ever-after, its immense attractions would immediately be reversed.
America’s non-state terrorist enemies, in the fashion of certain state enemies, also seek to “remain standing” and to believe that this critical objective can be realized only when the United States – the hated “other” in macrocosm – has become the dead man lying down. When the civilized and decent human being watching the evening news about the latest suicide bombing asks incredulously, “Why do they inflict such horror?” there is an ascertainably correct answer: “They do this,” goes this probative reply, out of an unhindered passion for “power over death.”
There is more. An enemy, whether state or non-state, cannot possibly kill as many foes as his primal passion for survival may demand. This means, among other intersecting considerations, that he may seek to induce or direct others to satisfy this passion. As a practical matter, such deflecting behavior points toward a problematic impulse toward genocide, an inclination that could be actualized in the future by adversarial resort to higher-order forms of terrorism (chemical/biological/nuclear)[18] and/or assorted crimes against humanity.[19]
Power and Survival
In complex matters of world politics and nuclear deterrence, the United States has much to learn on a conceptual level. Before its leaders can fully understand the true nature of relevant enemy intentions and capabilities, and hence the special dynamics of nuclear deterrence, they must first acknowledge certain primary connections between national survival and power over death. Once it can be understood that enemy definitions of the former are contingent upon the latter, these American leaders will be better positioned intellectually to take cost-effective reciprocal actions.[20]
It is always a serious mistake to believe that Reason governs the world,[21] a mistake that could prove fatal to states that would rely upon long-term nuclear deterrence. Successful deterrence postures require adversarial rationality, and such rationality could occasionally break down or prove inadequate.[22] For this reason, these postures will require a continuous process of high-quality “rethinking.” Any such process must be rooted in signal talents of “mind,” not belligerent nationalism or jingoistic bluster.
What are important connections between human death fear and the elimination of existential enemies? In this regard, scholars should consider the revealing remark of Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco. Describing killing as a possibly purposeful affirmation of one’s own personal survival, Ionesco observed in his Journal (1966):
I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemy’s death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society; that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.[23]
While certain enemies accept the zero-sum linkages between power and survival, others do not. Although this may suggest that some states stand on an enviably higher moral plane than their enemies, it may also place the virtuous state at an untenable security disadvantage, one that would make it too difficult to “remain standing.” Such disturbingly consequential asymmetry between state enemies could be addressed in part by reducing adversarial emphases on power-survival connections.
Some basic questions will need to be asked: Must a state become barbarous in order to endure? Must it “learn” to identify true power with survival over others, a predatory species survival that cannot abide the survival of certain enemies?[24] What are the unique connections between such learning and nuclear deterrence?
What is required is not a replication of enemy leadership crimes,[25] but policies that would finally recognize death-avoidance as the essential starting point for national security and national defense. With such rare recognition, visceral hostility and existential threat[26] could be rejected in toto, and a new ethos – one based on firm commitment to “remain standing”[27] – could be implemented.[28]
Changes Needed
Core changes will be necessary. Above all, humankind in general must finally rid itself of the notion that killing another person can somehow confer immunity from personal mortality. In Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, psychologist Otto Rank affirms: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.” At a minimum, all of our relevant national security and deterrence policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual and scientific[29] sorts of understanding. Empathy, also required, could follow accordingly.
Always, our “just wars,”[30] counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs should be conducted as intricate contests of mind over mind, not as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter. Among other things, this means persistently careful management of nuclear deterrence postures.
The “big picture” must be borne in mind by policy makers and strategists. Only a dual awareness of our common human destination (which is death) and the associated futility of sacrificial violence can offer an accessible “medicine” against foreseeable adversaries in the global “state of nature.” Only by embracing this difficult awareness can we ever relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of “all against all.”[31]
Acknowledging Human “Oneness”
In the end, the triumph of death is inevitable, and attempts to avoid death by killing “others” will remain futile and inglorious. Going forward, therefore, it is high time for new and more creative thinking about national security and human immortality. Instead of simply denying death, a cowardly and potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labeled “wish fulfillment” in The Future of an Illusion (1927), we must courageously acknowledge human finitude, viewing it as a too-long-overlooked and prospective blessing.
Ultimately, if “armed” with such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, people and states on this endangered planet could begin to think more insightfully about their immutably common destiny. In turn, this would mean using an always-overriding human commonality or human “oneness”[32] as the most promising template for expanding worldwide cooperation.
To be sure, all this represents a visionary and fanciful prescription, one unlikely ever to be grasped “in time.” But there does still remain a plausible way to begin. This way would require the leaders of major states to recognize that they are not meaningfully “world powers” (all are equally “mortal;” none have any verifiable “power over death”) and that a coordinated retreat from traditional geopolitical competition could never be a source of sensible regret.
There will be other important considerations. Our primary planetary survival task is an intellectual one,[33] but unprecedented human courage will also be needed.[34] To satisfy the required national leadership initiatives, we could have no good reason to expect the timely arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king.[35] Still, even ordinary political leaders could conceivably prove themselves up to the extraordinary task at hand. For this to happen, however, enlightened citizens of all countries must first cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about world politics, and (per the specific insights of twentieth-century German thinker Karl Jaspers) do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and intellect over blind faith and mind-numbing “mystery.”[36]
“In endowing us with memory,” writes philosopher George Santayana, “nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; still, without really knowing it, this very conviction and experience will have raised us in certain ways above mortality.”
The legacy of Westphalia (1648 treaty)[37] includes a continuing deification of the state. Though we may discover such potentially murderous deifications in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others, there have also been voices of a different sort. For Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” It is, he says in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.” In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega y’Gasset in the Revolt of the Masses. Here, the Spanish philosopher identifies the state as “the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it….”
In all global politics, it now warrants repeating, there can be no greater form of presumed power than power over death. Therein lies a magnitude of interrelated problems, including the inherently great and growing risks of nuclear deterrence.
For the most part, it is not for us to choose when we should die. Instead, our words and our destinies usually lie far beyond any discernible considerations of conscious individual selection. Still, we can choose to recognize our shared human fate and more particularly our derivative interdependence. This unbreakable intellectual recognition could carry with it indispensable global promise.
Much as we might prefer to comfort ourselves with qualitative presumptions of societal hierarchy and national differentiation, we humans are pretty much the same.[38] This incontestable sameness is plainly manifest to capable scientists and physicians. As we have just seen, our single most important human similarity, and the one least subject to any reasonable hint of counter-argument, is thatwe all die.
The Non-transferability of Physical Harms
There is still more. Across an entire planet, we can care for one another as humans, but only after we have first been willing to accept that the judgment of aresolutely common fate will not be waived by harms that we may choose to inflict upon “unworthy others.” While less than obvious, modern crimes of war, terror, and genocide are often “just” sanitized expressions of religious sacrifice. In the most egregious instances, any corresponding violence could explain a consummate human hope of overcoming private mortality through the targeted mass killing or exclusion of certain specific “outsiders.”
It’s a murderous calculus, but still not a new thought. Consider psychologist Ernest Becker’s ironic paraphrase of Elias Canetti in Escape from Evil: “…. each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” There is a deeply insightful observation lying latent in this metaphor. It is the uniquely dangerous notion that killing “others” can somehow confer immunity from one’s own mortality. Similarly, in Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, psychologist Otto Rank affirms: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”
Americans and other residents of our interconnected planet have a right to expect that a government of the United States should attempt to more seriously understand such vital and complex linkages. Here, America’s national security policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual sorts of understanding.[39] Our just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts, and anti-genocide programs must be fought or conducted as fully intricate contests of mind over mind, and not just as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.
Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible “medicine” against North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and assorted other more-or-less foreseeable adversaries in the global “state of nature.” This “natural” condition of anarchy was already well known to the Founding Fathers of the United States (most of whom had read Locke, Rousseau, Grotius, Hobbes, Vattel and Blackstone[40]). Only this difficult awareness can relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of “all against all,” a war that would become increasingly intolerable with any further spread of nuclear weapons.
With such spread, the same “dreadful equality” that obtains among individual human beings in “nature” would develop in world politics. At that point, nuclear deterrence would become more important and more problematic simultaneously. More than ever before, history deserves a reasonable pride of place. America was expressly founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. But this means something quite different in 2025 than it did back in 1787.
The American Imperative
What should this particular history signify for United States defense/security policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon some serious measures of authentic learning, not flippantly corrosive clichés or abundantly empty witticisms. For the foreseeable future, however, this is not a plausible presupposition.[41]
Human death fear has much to do with acquiring a better understanding of America’s current enemies, both national and sub-national (terrorist). Reciprocally, only a people who can feel deeply within itself the unalterable fate and suffering of a much broader global population will ever be able to embrace compassion and “rationally” reject collective violence. The returning American president should prepare to understand what this implies, both with pointedly specific reference to the United States and to this country’s various and still increasing state and sub-state adversaries.
Always, the existence of system in the world is obvious, immutable and pertinent.[42]During Trump I, “America First” meant America Alone and America Last. America could never have been truly “first” so long as (1) its president insisted upon achieving such exalted status at the expense of so many others; and (2) it failed to understand that international law remains part of the law of the United States. To once again seek to secure ourselves by diminishing others would offer a retrograde playbook for ever-recurring instances of war, terror and genocide.
In the end, for all humankind and as an irremediable element of biology, the “triumph of death” is inevitable. Attempts to avoid death by killing certain despised “others”[43] are feeble, futile, inglorious and intrinsically dangerous. Going forward, therefore, it is high time for new and more creative thinking about global security, human immortality and nuclear threat dynamics.
It follows from all this that the primary planetary survival task is an intellectual one, a matter of “mind.”[44] But unprecedented courage will also be needed.. To meet all required national leadership initiatives, we had no defensible reason in 2024 to expect the electoral arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king.[45] Accordingly, we are entering the ill-fated world of “Trump II.”
“In endowing us with memory,” writes George Santayana, “nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation….the truth of mortality….The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.”[46]
Though few will understand, such a “raising” is necessarily antecedent to human survival in world politics, though only if it is linked purposefully and self-consciously to “human oneness.” “Is it an end that draws near,” inquires philosopher Karl Jaspers, “or a beginning?” The correct answer will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war philosopher had to say about Jungian/Freudian “mass.”
In Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls, in German, das Mann (“The They.”) Drawing fruitfully upon earlier seminal insights of Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard as well as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Kierkegaard) that can quickly suffocate vital intellectual growth. For Heidegger’s “The They,” the crowning untruth lies in its acceptance of immortality at both institutional and personal levels and its encouragement of the falsely seductive notion that personal “power over death” is associated with the “sacredness” of nation-states or sub-state terror groups.
The arena of world politics (macrocosm) is endlessly violent because, inter alia, individual human beings (microcosm) compulsively fear death. Though widely unacknowledged and patently ironic, the murderous connections are longstanding and difficult to dispute in world of anti-reason. In the 19th century, Heinrich von Treitschke convincingly linked world politics and “earthly immortality.” Even before this author of Lectures on Politics, George F. Hegel identified the state in his The Philosophy of Right as the “march God in the world.”
Ultimately, states battle against other states amid Westphalian anarchy not for secular geopolitical primacy, but for individual human salvation. While the predictable result of such battles has always been death and mega death, not eternal or longer life, an overriding mythology still holds a prominent place. This is the lethal conviction that it is in war, not in any perpetual peace, that humans are able to acquire “power over death.”
Sometimes, this acquisition is intended to be direct – that is, an immediate consequence of killing on the side of God. More generally, however, such power over death devolves indirectly to general populations that are not involved in the actual business of slaughter. Even such de facto “bystanders” can have “God on their side.”
None of this is to wholly deny the validity of more traditionally accepted explanations of Realpolitik or power politics, namely that these struggles are about tangible goods, geography or “national security.” These evident and common explanations are not “wrong,” but they are epiphenomenal and trivial.
In William Goldings’ classic novel, Lord of the Flies, the marooned boys make grotesquely ritualistic war upon one another because they have been thrust into a netherworld of fear and chaos, but only because this netherworld threatens them with personal death. It is only after they have settled upon an amorphous but ubiquitous horror (“the beast”) that they decide to wage a titanic struggle to survive, a struggle that bears an obvious resemblance to the “normal” dynamics of world politics. In what amounts to yet another irony of inflicting death in order to bring freedom from death, the suffering boys are rescued by an English military ship, a naval vessel that will now transport them from their literal state of nature on the island to an ostensibly more civilized state of nature in world politics.
All ought to learn that the rancorous and barbarous conditions that obtained on a deserted island were just a crude microcosm of the wider system of international relations. But who can now rescue this wider system of Realpolitik from itself? Before we can meaningfully answer this core question, scholars and policy-makers will need to probe more closely behind the visible events the day, that is, beyond mere reflection. This indispensable probe will have to be theory-based. Theoretic generality is a trait of all serious scientific meaning. Authentically scientific inquiry in such matters is unassailable.[47]
In the beginning, in that primeval promiscuity in which the swerve toward lethal world politics first arose, the forerunners of modern nation-states established a system of perpetual struggle and violent conflict. Captivated by this self-destroying system of international relations, states still allow the degrading spirit of Realpolitik to spread everywhere unchecked, like an ideological gangrene on the surface of the earth. Rejecting all pertinent standards of logic and correct reasoning, this false consciousness of power politics imposes no reasonable standards upon itself. It continues to be rife despite its rebuffs. For reasons not always explicable, Realpolitik takes its long history of defeats as victory.
Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.” Now, with a system of human security increasingly dependent upon nuclear threat dynamics (i.e., nuclear deterrence), such false consciousness is only more apt to become unendurable.
There is more. As the universal power of religion will confirm, the vast majority of human beings are unable to accept their mortality.[48] Understood in terms of world politics, this incapacity suggests that state sovereignty will continue to be viewed by most as a useful institutional antidote to personal death. Such an illogical view may not be explicitly apparent even to Realpolitik adherents, and it would likely disregard certain felt benefits other than any presumed “power over death” (e.g., the enhanced personal status of belonging to a “powerful” country). In any event, however, it is a perspective that will not fade away on its own.
Truth is exculpatory. Whatever our principled preferences, the fact of having been born augurs badly for promises of immortality. The seemingly natural human inclination to deny this unassailable truth will continue to generate the same terrors from which we humans have endlessly sought refuge. The irony is staggering; still, it lies beyond any reason-based challenge.
In its consuming desperation to live perpetually, humankind has embraced a cornucopia of faiths that offer life everlasting is exchange for immutable loyalty. Such loyalty is transferred from faith to state or terror group, which then battles or prepares to battle with other states or terror groups. Though historians, political scientists and pundits routinely describe such conflicts as a struggle for secular influence (i.e., as power politics), it is “normally” something altogether different. This “something” is a presumptively titanic struggle between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Decency and Indecency. In any such struggle (let us recall the Bob Dylan lyrics) it is helpful to have “God on our side.”
In the United States, visions of an apocalyptic contest circulated widely during the 1950s Eisenhower years, and later, during the Reagan era.[49] More recently, Donald Trump’s core message of “American First” has not been advanced without underlying references to divine assistance. In significant measure, at least, for several million Trump supporters, their leader’s slogan of “America First” links an eschatological code term to “End Times.”
The War Against Self-Delusion
“Death,” says Norbert Elias, “is the absolute end of the person. So the greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger experienced.”[50] Now, major states in world politics must strive more vigorously to reduce the magnitude and likelihood of existential danger. In this connection, they must remain wary of planting new false hopes, of delusions that offer promises of personal survival through international war-planning.
The world remains full of noise and gratuitous rancor, but it is still possible to listen for real “music.” For this to happen, leaders, citizens and subjects will first have to detach themselves from variously mythical promises of power over death. In the most promising of all possible worlds, underlying human death fear could be made to disappear,[51] but this prospect seems unrealistic as policy. Vastly more “gentle” foundations will be required for world politics –foundations other than the inherently conflictual dynamics of Realpolitik. Such foundations were already crystallized in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of “planetization.”
Planetization is not just one step further along the imaginary incremental continuum of authority from “civilization.” Rather, it represents the very opposite of civilization.[52] A meaningful emphasis on global “oneness” or planetization now represents humankind’s only real hope for long-tern survival. Now, both scholars and statesmen should expressly affirm that such survival is first and foremost an intellectual obligation, one that can be satisfied not by any pre-scientific hopes for nation-state or terror group “victories,” but by concrete steps toward worldwide integration.
An immortal person is an oxymoron. “We the people” are all mortal; all of us must eventually die. Accordingly, the point of all rational global survival strategies should not be to deny this common fate, but to draw productively upon it for planet-wide reconciliations.[53] What is needed most urgently on this imperiled planet is a focus not on Platonic “shadows of reality,” but on durable archetypesof improved global security.[54] Though any such pie-in-the-sky recommendation will likely be dismissed as naïve ipso facto, nothing could ultimately prove more practical to human survival. Though difficult to understand, in safeguarding our planetary future, only the visionary could be the true realist.[55]
[1] Such politics define a “vigilante” or “Westphalian” system of international law. For legal origins, see: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia. Also, in pertinent international law, there are certain core obligations that each state owes to every other state, individually and collectively.
[2] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (DC Heath, Lexington Books, 1984).
[3]Logic here correlates “immortality” of the macrocosm (the state) to immortality of the microcosm (the individual citizen or subject). Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined, in his classic Philosophy of Right (1820), that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” All of this “correlation “is contrary to ordinary logic and science. As the matter has been summed up by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ God, Death and Time (1993): “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.” (p. 45).
[4]In world politics, says philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, any deeply-felt promise of immortality is of “transcendent importance.” Seehis Religion in the Making, 1927.
[5] While this connection is most obvious on matters concerning jihadist terrorism, it is also found in certain more orthodox mass casualty behaviors of international war. See, on jihadist terror and power over death, by this author: Louis René Beresfile:///C:/Users/lberes/AppData/Local/Temp/Sacred%20Violence%20Religion%20and%20Terrorism.pdf and Louis René Beres
[6] We may recall Friedrich Nietzsche’s apt warning in Zarathustra: “Do not seek the higher man at the marketplace.”
[7] See Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, opened for signature, December 9, 1948, entered into force, January 12, 1951, 78 U.N.T.S. 277. Although the criminalizing aspect of international law that proscribes genocidal conduct may derive from a source other than the Genocide Convention (i.e. it may emerge from customary international law and be included in different international conventions), such conduct is dearly a crime under international law. Even where the conduct in question does not affect the interests of more than one state, it becomes an international crime whenever it constitutes an offense against the world community delicto ius gentium. See M.C. Bassiouni, International Criminal Law: A Draft International Criminal Code 30‑44 (1980). See also Bassiouni, “The Penal Characteristics of Conventional International Criminal Law,” 15 Case W. Res. J. Int’l 27‑37 (1983).
[8] Still the best scholarly clarification of these connections are René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977) and René Girard, The Scapegoat (1986).
[9]See, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/03/08/iraq-afghanistan-and-the-end-of-winning-wars
[10] On the various meanings of Realpolitik, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984).
[11] See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[12] This brings to mind the closing query of Agamemnon in The Oresteia by Aeschylus: “Where will it end? When will it all be lulled back into sleep, and cease, the bloody hatreds, the destruction”?
[13] See Louis René Beres, “Self-Determination, International Law and Survival on Planet Earth,” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 11, No.1., pp. 1-26.
[14] See Epicurus, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (Whitney H. Oates et al., 1940), p. 282.
[15]Through the ages, with “God on our Side,” conflicting states and religions have asserted that personal immortality can be achieved, but sometimes only at the sacrificial expense of certain despised “others,” of “heathen,” “blasphemers,” “apostates.” When he painted The Triumph of Death in ca. 1562, Peter Bruegel drew upon his direct personal experience with religious war and disease plague. In the sixteenth century, he had already understood that any intersection of these horrors (one man-made, the other natural) could be ill-fated, force-multiplying and even synergistic. This last term describes results wherein the “whole” outcome exceeds the calculable sum of all constituent “parts.”
[16] But we must also consider theview of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1932). Here, Ortega identifies the state not as a convenient source of immortality, but as the very opposite. For him, the state is “the greatest danger,” mustering its immense and irresistible resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority that disturbs it….” Earlier, in his chapter “On the New Idol” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote similarly: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters…All-too-many are born – for the superfluous the state was invented.” Later, in the same chapter: “A hellish artifice was invented there (the state), a horse of death…Indeed, a dying for many was invented there; verily, a great service to all preachers of death!”
[17] See, for example, by this author: Louis René Beres, “Martyrdom and International Law,” Jurist, September 10, 2018; and Louis René Beres, “Religious Extremism and International Legal Norms: Perfidy, Preemption and Irrationality,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Vol. 39, No.3., 2007-2008, pp. 709-730.
[18] This brings to mind dangers from the adversarial destruction of nuclear energy reactors. See, by Bennett Ramberg: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/ukraine-shows-nuclear-reactors-at-risk-during-war-by-bennett-ramberg-2022-08
[19] For definition of Crimes Against Humanity, see: Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis Powers and Charter of the International Military Tribunal, done at London, August 8, 1945, 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279 (entered into force, August 8, 1945).
[20] Such remedial action will itself depend, in part, on the particular subjective metaphysics of time accepted by pertinent national decision-makers. For an early article by this author dealing with clarifying linkages between such subjective metaphysics and national security decision-making, see: Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-Making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.
[21]See Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952).
[22] Expressions of decisional irrationality could take different or overlapping forms. These include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of pertinent individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary national decision maker).
[23] This comment from Ionesco’s Journal appeared in British Magazine Encounter (May 1966). See also: Eugene Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal (Grove Press, 1968). Elsewhere, says Ionesco, “People kill and are killed in order to prove to themselves that life exists.” See the distinguished dramatist’s only novel, The Hermit 102 (1973).
[24] Such questions have been raised by this author for many years, but usually in explicit reference to more broadly theoretical or generic nuclear threats. See, for example, Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis (1972); Louis René Beres, Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat (1979; second edition, 1987); Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984); Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (1986); and Louis René Beres, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016).
[25] Under international law, which is also law of the United States, responsibility of national leaders for international crimes is not limited by official position or by requirement of direct personal actions. On the principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb) 12 LAW REPORTS OF TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS 1, 71 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp. 1949); see: Parks, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES, 62 MIL.L.REV. 1 (1973); O’Brien, THE LAW OF WAR, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY AND VIETNAM, 60 GEO.L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. DEPT OF THE ARMY, ARMY SUBJECT SCHEDULE No. 27 – 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907) 10 (1970). The direct individual responsibility of leaders for genocide and genocide-like crimes is unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the Act of State defense. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Strat. 1544, E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, Art. 7. Under traditional international law, violations were the responsibility of the state, as a corporate actor, and not of the individual human decision-makers in government and in the military.
[26] On the prospective lawfulness of such threats, including nuclear deterrent threats and actual nuclear engagement, see: “Summary of the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Advisory Opinion, 1996, I.C.J., 226 (Opinion of 8 July 1996). The key conclusion of this Opinion is as follows: “…in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
[27]International law is part of US domestic law. In the precise 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, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” 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) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[28]The precise origins of anticipatory self-defense in customary law lie in the Caroline, a case that concerned the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada against British rule. Following this case, the serious threat of armed attack has generally justified certain militarily defensive actions. In an exchange of diplomatic notes between the governments of the United States and Great Britain, then U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster outlined a framework for self-defense that did not require an antecedent attack. Here, the jurisprudential framework permitted a military response to a threat so long as the danger posed was “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” See: Beth M. Polebaum, “National Self-defense in International Law: An Emerging Standard for a Nuclear Age,” 59 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 187, 190-91 (1984) (noting that the Caroline case had transformed the right of self-defense from an excuse for armed intervention into a legal doctrine). Still earlier, see: Hugo Grotius, Of the Causes of War, and First of Self-Defense, and Defense of Our Property, reprinted in 2 Classics of International Law, 168-75 (Carnegie Endowment Trust, 1925) (1625); and Emmerich de Vattel, The Right of Self-Protection and the Effects of the Sovereignty and Independence of Nations, reprinted in 3 Classics of International Law, 130 (Carnegie Endowment Trust, 1916) (1758). Also, Samuel Pufendorf, The Two Books on the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, 32 (Frank Gardner Moore., tr., 1927 (1682).
[29] Says Jose Ortega y’ Gassett about science (Man and Crisis, 1958): “Science, by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual, is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation…. The latter is not possible without the former.”
[30] See especially Hugo Grotius (The Law of War and Peace, 1625); Christian Wolff, The Law of Nations Treated According to the Scientific Method (1749) and Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature (1735). Worth noting here is that though the Founding Fathers of the United States were well familiar with Grotius, Wolff and Pufendorf, these names would go wholly unrecognized by today’s US Congress.
[31] Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan still offers an illuminating and enduring vision of chaos in world politics. Says the English philosopher in Chapter XIII, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery:” during chaos, a condition which Hobbes identifies as a “time of War,” it is a time “…where every man is Enemy to every man… and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” At the time of writing, Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition existing among individual human beings -because of what he called the “dreadful equality” of individual men in nature being able to kill others – but this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappeared with the global spread of nuclear weapons.
[32] The history of western philosophy and jurisprudence includes illustrious advocates of global unity, interrelatedness or “oneness.” Most notable are Voltaire and Goethe. We need only recall Voltaire’s biting satire in the early chapters of Candide and Goethe’s oft-repeated comment linking belligerent nationalism to the declining stages of civilization. One may also note Samuel Johnson’s expressed conviction that patriotism “is the last refuge of a scoundrel;” William Lloyd Garrison’s observation that “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government. Our country is the world, our countryman is all mankind;” and Thorsten Veblen’s plain comment that “The patriotic spirit is at cross-purposes with modern life.” Similarly, straightforward sentiments are discoverable in writings of the American Transcendentalists (especially Emerson and Thoreau) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human. Let scholars also recall Santayana’s coalescing remark in Reason and Society: “A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.” The unifying point of all such cosmopolitan remarks is that narrow-minded patriotism is not merely injurious, it is also “unpatriotic.”
[33] In the 17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically, in his justly celebrated Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[34]See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Yale Global: https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage
[35] See by this author, at Oxford University Press, Louis René Beres: https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/
[36] See Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952).
[37] The condition of anarchy, which has its codified origins at the Peace of Westphalia,stands in marked contrast to the jurisprudential assumption of solidarity between all states in the presumably common struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a peremptory expectation (known formally in international law as a jus cogens assumption), is already mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 C.E.); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey, tr., Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); Emmerich De Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[38] We may also think here of an applicable Talmudic metaphor: “The earth from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.”
[39] Useful hereare the more deeply philosophical insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955):”The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false, and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”
[40] According to Blackstone, echoing Vattel, each state and nation is expected “to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon offenses against that universal law….” See: 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4, “Of Public Wrongs.” Lest anyone ask about the significance of Blackstone, one need only point out that Commentaries are the original and core foundation of the laws of the United States.
[41] Anti-intellectualism has always been a large part of American political life. Ironically, the Founding Fathers of the United States were intellectuals. As explained by American historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 145. See also the authoritative volume by Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (1959).
[42] In the words of philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his The Phenomenon of Man: “The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature….”
[43] Such attempts may be more appealing during times of disease pandemic, when the “benefits” of scapegoating are especially palpable. During the medieval Black Death, for example, it was common to blame the Jews as well poisoners. In the twentieth century, Third Reich propaganda was often deliberately propped up on the foundations of such previously orchestrated irrationality.
[44] See Apollinaire, “It must not be forgotten that it is perhaps more dangerous for a nation to allow itself to be conquered intellectually than by arms.”
[45] See, by this author, at Oxford University Press: Louis René Beres, https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/
[46] See George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Religion 260 (1905).
[47] “Theory is a net,” says the German poet Novalis in a quotation embraced by Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) “only those who cast, can catch.”
[48] This “truth” is perhaps best explained by the philosopher George Santayana in his Reason in Religion (1905).
[49] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984); and Louis René Beres, America Outside the World: The Collapse of US Foreign Policy (1987).
[50] See Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying 44 (1985).
[51] Fear of death, we have already seen in world politics, not only degrades normal life, it creates vast fields of premature corpses. In world politics, observes Alfred North Whitehead, any deeply-felt promise of immortality is always of “transcendent importance.” Seethe philosopher’s Religion in the Making (1927).
[52] In his Notes from Underground (1862): Dostoyevsky reminds us about civilization: “All it does, I’d say, is develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development man will yet learn how to better enjoy bloodshed.”
[53] Although he doesn’t ever approach these issues from the standpoint of international relations or international law, the Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno best explains the most imaginative and profound connections between the ineradicable universality of death and what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls “planetization.” When I was still a “working professor” at Purdue University, I always advised my best students that Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (1921) was the single most important book I had read. I continue to stand by this singular assessment.
[54] On the meaning of such useful frames of reference, see: Elemire Zolla, Archetypes: The Persistence of Unifying Patterns (1981).
[55] A similar insight was offered by famed Italian film director Federico Fellini.
