“We are mad, not only individuals, but nations also. We restrain manslaughter and isolated murders, but what of war and the so-called glory of killing whole peoples? …. Man, the gentlest of animals, is not ashamed to glory in blood-shedding and to wage war when even the beasts are living in peace together.” -Seneca, Letters, 95
In 1880, when sculptor Auguste Rodin began the most ambitious project of his career – a pair of doors based on Dante’s allegorical journey through hell – he presented a unique view of the underworld. This view was intentionally more complex than the one offered by Inferno. Conspicuously, Rodin’s plaster composition shaped a perpetually agonized body of humanity, one writhing en masse through eternity, struggling against shackles of “sin.” Less evident, but plausibly much more important, was a solitary figure in the lintel.
Who was this enigmatic figure, and what possible relevance could it have to present-day world politics? To begin, the solitary form, known popularly as “The Thinker,” broods contemplatively from his lentil perch on the agitated swarm below. Whatever its interpretation, this depiction is about much more than statuary aesthetics. Taken as metaphor, it is about the eternal primacy of independent thought.[1]
Speculatively, Rodin imagined The Thinker as one who reviews and re-imagines the fate of an imperiled species. Then, as now, the background of the world, forever in flux, was highlighted by an immeasurable vastness of plausible harms. Then, as now, it was left up to “The Thinker” to identify promising global alternatives.[2] Then, as now, there was no more important task for humankind, at least as long as the species would remain loyal to both Aristotelian reason and Cartesian doubt.[3]
To Soar Above Power Politics: A National and Global Imperative[4]
In the beginning, in that primal promiscuity during which the swerve toward power politics first gathered strength, nation-states condemned themselves to interminable failure. Today, the United States, still captivated by this lethal swerve, is endangered less by any specific enemy aggressions than by the continuously misguided premises of traditional international relations. At the same time, the Russian president’s ongoing crimes against Ukraine express a tangible example of Realpolitik failure. In a worst case conclusion, these particular crimes against humanity, especially if combined with Vladimir Putin’s apparent policy of normalizing escalation to nuclear weapons, would spawn a nuclear war.
For the United States, the ultimate challenge of foreign policy is no longer just a return to geopolitical “normalcy” after Donald Trump.[5] It is the creation of a stable peace and justice system for planet earth as a whole.[6] Today, following Russian president Vladimir Putin’s multiple aggressions against Ukraine, questions of adversarial rationality should be brought to the fore of US policy-making. More precisely, it is already vital to sort out differences between genuine enemy irrationality and pretended enemy irrationality.
Are capable scholars meaningfully at work on such an indispensable task?
Donald J. Trump’s “America First”[7] expresses the reductio ad absurdum of realpolitik thinking, but any US commitment to the traditional dynamics of power politics would be shortsighted.[8] In the end, to ensure a more satisfactory foreign policy for the United States, President Donald Trump will first have to align this policy with multiple needs of the planet in toto. To accomplish such an unprecedented task, various antecedent analytic orientations would be required.
The task of “alignment” is not for the intellectually faint of heart. It concerns, inter alia, the perplexing awareness that credible foundations for American foreign policy success must be law-based[9] and knowledge-based.[10] As part of this awareness, law and knowledge will need to be considered together; that is, in their variously possible intersections and synergies.[11]
This consideration should go beyond the shameless banality/venality of “Trump II” slogans. It should also extend beyond any ad hoc “fence-mending” with America’s dwindling alliance partners. To garner tangible success, such consideration would need to be accompanied by both serious erudition and determinable “will.”[12] This would not be a job for ever-obeisant political officials or appointed functionaries.
Left unrevised, core foreign policy policies for the United States would remain negative and without long-term promise. But how best to proceed? Turning away from a perpetually failed system of national and world politics,[13] where should capable US decision-makers now place their jurisprudential and geopolitical “bets?”
This is not “merely” an important question; it represents the most importantquestion confronting any American government. Even critically urgent problems of global warming and climate change identify less immediately-urgent issues. Unless the United States can help prod the planet as a whole to rise above its worldwide ethos of belligerent nationalism, the “normal” dynamics of world politics will lead us toward global self-annihilation.
This once-unimaginable prospect is expressed here not just as a figure of speech, but – especially after Putin’s ongoing crimes and threats concerning Ukraine – a manifestly plausible risk. It is, moreover, a risk that could be realized in variously identifiable increments or as sudden catastrophic “bolts from the blue.” For now, amid the relentless incoherence of Trump II, it is a prospect about which more is unknown than known.
The Intellectual Starting Point
Even after continuing moral, legal[14] and intellectual failure, latent US foreign policy hopes for world system transformation should be affirmed. Among other things, scholars and practitioners will need to take as axiomatic that American and global survival interests are inextricably bound up with each other. What we require now is a prompt escape from the contentious spirit of competitive tribes (a corrosive spirit that is irreconcilable with human survival) and a promisingly sincere conceptual acceptance of “human oneness.”[15] For the moment, the calculable odds of ever meeting such a requirement would seem discouragingly low. Nonetheless, the relevant risks would be rational and worth taking.
At its conceptual core, the problem should not seem bewildering. What cannot benefit the world system as a whole can never benefit the individual nation-state.[16] We may recall, in this connection, the elucidating parable of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “What does not benefit the entire hive is no benefit to the single bee.”
But we are still at the beginning. Until now, humans in general, not just Americans, have managed to miss what is most important in world politics. Now, the missed opportunity is to finally acknowledge that there exists a latent and determinative “oneness” to all world politics.[17] To continue to ignore this primal understanding would be to condemn our planet to arms and oblivion. This means to continue to tinker foolishly and irrationally at the outer margins of what is actually required.
Where Should We Look?
A further query surfaces. This critical aspect of human identity can be encountered in certain vital but generally-ignored world literatures, especially such literary-philosophic thinkers as Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud,[18] Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This aspect’s persistent rejection in “real life,” even by the world’s great universities, reflects more than a lamentable unworthiness. It reflects an elemental threat to every nation-state.
For human survival, greater respect for erudition is sorely needed.[19] But such respect will not be nearly enough. The central analytic problem here would not be the absence of US presidential will and capacity per se, but the uncertainty felt by every nation-state’s leaders concerning the reciprocal intentions of other national (or sub-national) decision-makers.
There is more. To be more effective, US presidential efforts should be oriented toward expanding control over too many separate and independent national wills. Gaining such imperative control would represent a specific example of a more general human problem – the decisional difficulty that arises when the benefits of common or collective action are contingent on a reliable expectation that other “players” will cooperate.[20] Inter alia, such difficulty would represent a principal impediment to calculating Vladimir Putin’s willingness to cross the nuclear weapons threshold.[21]
It’s a very old problem. The core dynamics were already described by Florentine philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli in The Discourses (1531):
The world is a stupendous machine, composed of innumerable parts, each of which being a free agent has a volition and action of its own; and on this ground arises the difficulty of assuring success in any enterprise depending on the volition of numerous agents. We may set the machine in motion, and dispose every wheel to one certain end; but when it depends on the volition of any one wheel, and the corresponding action of every wheel, the result is uncertain.
There will be additional hurdles, but the optimal conceptual overview remains clear. Left unrevised, any stubborn human commitment to belligerent nationalism (a commitment that can seemingly strengthen private feelings of belonging and personal worth) would signify a grim future of war, climate catastrophe, terrorism[22] and genocide.[23] In the end, no state’s foreign policy that remains at cross-purposes with systemic well-being could be “realistic.” Inevitably, the same rancorous logic of possessive individualism that drives realpolitik-based foreign policies (e.g., Donald Trump’s “America First”) would undermine critical existential foundations of national and international life.
On Conceptual Underpinnings
To further illustrate meaningful arguments against realpolitik, or world system belligerence, we should consider another clarifying metaphor: The states in world politics coexist in the fashion of herdsmen who must share a common pasture and who thus find it advantageous to continuously increase the size of their respective herds. Although these herdsmen have calculated that it is in their own best private interests to incessantly augment these herds, they have calculated incorrectly. This is because they have failed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple separate actions.
This devastating impact includes an overgrazed commons and economic ruin.[24] Ipso facto, it also includes various political and social costs. Antecedent questions should also be raised. Why have we humans (and we Americans in particular) made ourselves existentially vulnerable?
The lucid and elemental answer must embrace a pervasive willingness to seek personal identities as recognizable members of a particular group. From a purely intellectual standpoint, such an explanation ought not to appear ambiguous. To wit, humans generally fear solitude or “aloneness” more than anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death.[25]
Amid the “balance-of-power” chaos that is now stampeding across several continents,[26] individuals willingly abide loyalty to destructive claims of “tribe.” Always, almost everywhere, people desperate “to belong” subordinate themselves to the most substantially far-reaching expectations of nation, classor faith. But it is a Faustian bargain. What then?
More often than we might first care to admit, such subordination carries within itself a prospectively overriding acceptance of “martyrdom.” Recalling the marooned English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we can be reminded that the veneer of human civilization is always razor thin.[27] Leaving aside vastly impressive scientific and medical discoveries, whole swaths of humankind remain dedicated to atavistic practices of sacrifice and war.[28] What may first appear as “mere fiction” in Lord of the Flies is nonetheless realistically foreboding and enduringly realistic.
To change direction in time, a human obligation that has now become indispensable, scholars and policy-makers should begin at the beginning; that is, with the microcosm, with the individual human being. Incontestably, death remains the prototype of all injustice. More than anything else, the primal fear of “not being” can become determinative. Still when considered together with the understanding that human death fear can create relentless inclinations to collective violence (war, terrorism and genocide) this difficult insight could also contain foreign policy opportunities.
Pertinent evidence abounds. Above all, we humans still generally fail to understand something primary: The always universal apprehension of death, when taken as common anguish, could sometimes prove helpful. More precisely, it could assist in the prevention of war, terror and genocide. If creatively “exploited,” this ubiquitous apprehension could invite a steadily expanding ambit of international empathy[29] and worldwide compassion.[30]
By definition, any such welcome expansion would be the literal opposite of US President Donald Trump’s “America First.”
“America First” represents a defiled and defiling US foreign policy, one based not on any measured analytic foundations, but on crudely exclusionary celebrations. Of necessity, remembering Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin’s uncommon wisdom in The Phenomenon of Man (1955), these egocentric celebrations are “false and against nature.”
Left in place, “America First” would render the United States increasingly vulnerable to multiple and potentially synergistic harms.[31] Today, owing especially to Russia’s savage and still-escalating aggression against Ukraine,[32] finding ourselves in extremis atomicum is no longer just a bad dream. For the first time since the beginnings of “Cold War I” in 1945, a superpower leader has been speculating openly and approvingly about nuclear weapons use.
Sometimes, national security strategy[33] can reflect provenance. The United States can never be improved or rescued by narrowly contrived political solutions. Foreign policy was not, as Donald Trump has steadfastly maintained, “about attitude, not preparation.”[34] On the contrary, it should always represent the well-reasoned product of historical, legal and scientific understanding. On these concerns, both President Trump and his critics should affirm that US national security is never centered ont the “marketplace.”[35]
Knowing Conceptual Details
To succeed in enduringly meaningful ways, US foreign policy will have to declare an expanding commitment to global cooperation, one based not only on rational thought,[36] but also on human species singularity.[37] Only then, together with all other states, could America become “first.” Back in 1758, Emmerich de Vattel noted in The Law of Nations (Or the Principles of Natural Law): “Nations, being no less subject to the laws of nature than individuals, what one man owes to other men, one Nation, in its turn, owes to other Nations.”[38] Later, the justly celebrated eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher continued: “The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.”
But exactly what contributions are required? In global politics, appropriately durable remediations will demand a more penetrating depth of analytic thought. Going forward, President Trump will have to accept a more fully imaginative and global set of security understandings. Among other things, this set would express the subtle but unavoidable awareness that the outer worlds of politics and statecraft are essentially a mirrored reflection of our private selves.
It is only within the deeply opaque mysteries of individual human mortality – mysteries focused on the effectively timeless and universal preoccupation with earthly power over death – that we should seek the core truths of human interdependence and American national security.[39] It follows that whenever we look toward the more secure management of war, terrorism and genocide, any stubbornly continuous posture resembling “America First” would steeply undermine our most worthwhile national objectives.
There is more. As we must now reason within the crumbling trade policies of Trump II, it’s time to end the convenient fictions of American “exceptionalism.” Variously relevant strategies of reformation could go back a long way. The ancient Greek tragedies wisely recorded a suitably primal query: “Where will it end? When will it all be lulled back into sleep, and cease, the bloody hatred, the destruction?”[40]
Quo Vadis?
Where shall we go from here? Exeunt omnes? America’s president has demonstrably few serious ideas, and knowingly embraces a never-ending panoply of law-violations.[41] Among the latter are patently unhelpful distortions of global tariff policy and a conspicuously counter-productive opposition to humane and law-based immigrations.
There is more. In addition to our obvious intellectual advantages, we humans are not the same as any other species. Thereis rampant killing among the “lower” animals, of course, but generally it is not gratuitous savagery. For the most part, it is survival driven. Such killing is “natural.” Biologically, it “makes sense.”
What sort of species, we need to inquire, can tolerate or even venerate a national leader’s openly destructive orientations and gratifications? To what extent, if any, is this venal human trait related to diminishing prospects for erecting civilization upon dignified premises of human “oneness”? To what extent, if any, does realpolitik-based barbarism (e.g. Putin’s Nuremberg-category crimes[42] against Ukraine) derive from an always-underlying human death fear? Are life and death always a zero-sum calculation in world politics?[43]
“Our unconscious,” observes Freud, “does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.” What we ordinarily describe as heroism, therefore, may in some cases be nothing more than denial. Still, though widely disregarded, an expanding acceptance of personal mortality could represent our last best chance to endure as a once-enviable American nation.
During the Trojan War, as we may learn from Homer, Achilles led his Greek warriors to battle against Troy with the revealing rallying cry: “Onward, for immortality.” Today’s rallying cries are generally less open and less primal, but they still harbor the same core human fears and expectations. Today, as ever, the greatest conceivable form of power in world politics remains presumed power over death.
Understanding History as Quest for Immortality
Can an American president and his advisors learn something that might benefit both his nation and the wider global community, something that could move us gainfully beyond Schadenfreude (taking pleasure from the sufferings of others) and toward wider human cooperation? In response, widening patterns of global cooperation represent the only plausible path to American survival. Ipso facto, “America First” can only mean “America Last.”
Death “happens” to us all, but our useful awareness of this expectation is blunted by multiple and overlapping deceptions. To accept forthrightly that we are all just flesh and blood creatures of biology is much more than most human beings can tolerably bear. “Normally,” there is even a palpable embarrassment felt by living persons in the presence of death. Here, it is as if death and dying had been reserved only for “others.”[44]
That we, as individuals, should cleave so desperately to allegedly sacred promises of redemption and immortality is not by itself a survival issue. It only becomes a survival problem, one that we may thus convincingly associate with war, terrorism, orgenocide, when various redemption promises are forcibly reserved to explicitly selected segments of humanity and simultaneously denied to others. States are “the coldest of all cold monsters,” warns Friedrich Nietzsche in Zarathustra,[45] but – in a contra view from fellow German philosopher W. F. Hegel – “The State is the march of God through the world.”[46]
In the end, all national and global politics are merely reflection, a thinly symptomatic expression of more deeply underlying private needs. “Normally,” the most glaringly pressing of these accumulated needs is the avoidance of personal death.
For the most part, it is not for us to choose when we should die. Instead, our words, our faces, even our irrepressible human countenance must sometime lie immeasurably beyond any conscious considerations of human decision-making or individual choice. Nonetheless, we can still choose to recognize a shared human fate and, concurrently, our derivative and unbreakable interdependence. Such uniquely powerful intellectual recognition could carry along with it an equally significant global promise, one that must remain distressingly unacknowledged in the “everyone for himself” world of global realpolitik.
Much as we might prefer to comfort ourselves with variously qualitative presumptions of societal hierarchy and national differentiation, we humans are all pretty much the same. This incontestable sameness is manifest to capable scientists and physicians. But our single most important similarity and the one least subject to any reasonable hint of counter-argument is that we all die.
Whatever our diverging views on what might actually happen to us after death, the basic mortality that we share represents our last best chance for enhanced global coexistence and viable world community.[47] This is the case, however, only if we can first accomplish the difficult leap from acknowledging our shared fate to “operationalizing” suitably generalized feelings of empathy. Any such “leap” is first and foremost an intellectualtask.
Across an entire planet, wehumans can care for one another with dedication and dignity, but only after we have first accepted that the judgment of a common fate will not be waived by any harms inflicted upon “others.” While generally inconspicuous, modern crimes of war,[48] crimes against humanity, genocide, crimes against peace and crimes of terror-violence are often effectively disguised expressions of human sacrifice. In its most egregious instances, sacrificial violence has represented a literally desperate hope of overcoming mortality via targeted mass killings of “outsiders.”[49]
It’s not a new thought. Consider psychologist Ernest Becker’s oft-quoted paraphrase of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti in Escape from Evil (1975): “…each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.”
A Moral, Legal and Intellectual Prerequisite
There is more. National foreign policies should build upon genuinely intellectual forms of understanding. Without exception, “just wars,” counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs should be fought or conducted as intricate contests of “mind over mind,” not as narrowly tactical struggles of “mind over matter.” This now includes America’s obligation under international and national law[50] to oppose Russian crimes against Ukraine: crimes of war; crimes against peace; and crimes against humanity. Failing in this obligation would not only represent abdication of legal responsibility, but also pave the way for future nuclear confrontations.
Only a dual awareness of our common human mortality and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible “medicines” against Russia, North Korea, China, Iran and other more-or-less foreseeable state adversaries. Humankind’s “natural” condition of anarchy was already well known to America’s Founding Fathers, many of whom had read Locke, Rousseau, Grotius and Hobbes as well as Vattel and Pufendorff. Only this difficult dual awareness could relieve a still-ascendant Hobbesian war of “all against all” in world politics.[51]
History, which philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset calls “an illustrious war against death” (Man and Crisis, 1958) deserves evident pride of place. Jurisprudentially, the United States was founded on the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. But this means something very different in 2025 than it did in 1787.
What should this country’s legal history signify for ongoing US foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, and it does presuppose an American democracy founded on genuine erudition and correct reasoning.[52] Among other things, it ought to presuppose that Russia’s flagrant indifference to international law in Ukraine is unacceptable to the United States.
There is one related expectation. The primacy of system in world politics needs to be made more explicit.[53] Derivatively, tangible affirmations of “America First,” or other “normal” expressions of realpolitik would signal policy ipso facto.
America can never be truly “first” as long as its leaders insist on achieving gainful outcomes at the expense of other states. Merely to sustain this country’s basic security, the American president will have to move his country beyond eternally futile forms of military competition[54] and toward variously necessary forms of cooperative “oneness.”
We could be reminded of this obligation by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s sobering query in Endgame: “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?”[55] In the absence of meeting this imperative US foreign policy challenge, future civilizations, such as might still arise, will examine the skeletal remains of our last realpolitik epoch with a deserved sneer. Thrashing about in the paleontology of international relations, they will conclude that this once-avoidable declension was fetid upon its advent, that its accumulated national hopes were irrationally contrived from the start, and that back “in the beginning” (in the seventeenth century following Westphalia in 1648), its doctrinal foundations had been constructed upon ever-shifting “sand.”
How shall humankind survive? Even if not genuinely “mad,” the nations remain on a refractory trajectory of war, terror and genocide. There do exist certain identifiable ways of escaping from this trajectory, but we should still remain wary of any further species descent. In part, this means condemning Russian crimes against Ukraine, and, correspondingly, a conscious effort to reject Donald Trump’s ill-fated “America First.”
To satisfactorily meet its national security obligations, the United States should immediately seek to replace a long-doomed global power politics with creative intellection and disciplined thinking. In the final analysis, it’s all really quite straightforward. Getting beyond realpolitik should become feasible and plausible because there exists absolutely no reasonable alternative. Without far-reaching world system transformation, humankind could expect only endlessly expanding wars of annihilation and progressively irremediable harms.
Russia’s current crimes against Ukraine represent a significant and broad-natured warning. For now, this means that these crimes reveal just the “tip of the iceberg.” The much larger task for those states that the UN Statute of the International Court of Justice calls “civilized nations” will be to fashion a more stable and harmonious world system context. Before this can happen, prima facie, scholars and policy makers will need to look meaningfully behind the news, especially at unceasing intersections of madness, rationality and chaos.[56]
It will be a daunting but unavoidable task, one for disciplined thinkers, not for marginally-educated pundits or rancorous politicos. Drawn from Dante’s Inferno, Rodin’s famous doors could offer a purposeful aesthetic starting point. Here, dedicated scholars and policy-makers would focus on “The Thinker,” a solitary human figure able to contemplate what needs to be accomplished for “redemption.”
Even at its eleventh hour, humankind should focus on variously core linkages between madness, irrationality and world politics. This task should be initiated at a conceptual-theoretical level, and represent more than just one more worrisome narrative of current global problems. Unless capable thinkers can finally learn to look “behind the news,” that news will become increasingly barbarous. At one not yet determinable moment in time, it could also become unendurable and irreversible.
[1] By definition, independent thought must also be courageous thought. On this point, by present author, see: Louis René Beres, Yale Global, https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage
[2]This does not mean, however, to account for every conceivable alternative. Clarification of this important point can be found at “Occam’s Razor” or the “principle of parsimony.” It stipulates an analytic preference for the simplest explanation that is consistent with scientific method. Regarding US nuclear war concerns, it urges, inter alia, that the president’s military planners seek not to identify and examine every seemingly important variable, but rather “to say the most, with the least.” This presents a too-often neglected imperative. All too often, strategists and planners mistakenly attempt to be too inclusive in processes of explanation, thereby distancing themselves from more efficient or “parsimonious” theory.
[3] Reference is made here to the “universal doubt” encouraged by René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).
[4] This imperative can never be an exclusionary matter ofone orthe other, either national or global. Any such separation would contradict the immutable mutuality of national and global security interests. Accordingly, there can never be any point to suggesting that overriding security interests of the United States could be detached from global security as a whole. For an early book by this author concerning such a lethal detachment, see: Louis René Beres, Transforming World Politics: The National Roots of World Peace (University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, 1975).
[5] See, for example, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/april-2021/after-trump-us-nuclear-strategy-and-north-korea’
[6] By definition, any such system would also represent an improved structure of international law.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) concluded the Thirty Years War, and created the still-enduring system of international law. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1, Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two agreements comprise the Peace of Westphalia. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was first published in 1651, just three years after the Peace of Westphalia. It is at Chapter XIII that Hobbes famously references the Westphalian “state of nature” as an anarchic situation characterized by “continual fear; and danger of violent death….”
[7] Donald Trump’s philosophy of belligerent nationalism – codified as “America First” – willfully undermines the protective principles of international law. This law, an integral part of the coordinating system of separately sovereign states in world politics, assumes a reciprocally common obligation of states to supply benefits to one another. This particular assumption of jurisprudential solidarity is known formally as a “peremptory” or jus cogens expectation, or one that is never subject to any question or reversal. It can be discovered early in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis; Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (1625); and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[8]In Man in the Modern Age (1931), German philosopher Karl Jaspers identifies these bewildering dynamics as “an unceasing maelstrom of reciprocal deception and self-deception by ideologies.” Throughout history,power politics has been associated withassurances of personal immortality. In his posthumously published lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined, in his Philosophy of Right (1820), that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” The “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation from mere principle of action to a sacred end in itself, drew its originating strength from the doctrine of sovereignty advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially conceived as a principle of internal order, this doctrine underwent a specific metamorphosis, whence it became the formal or justifying rationale for international anarchy – that is, for the global “state of nature.” First established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as a power absolute and above the law. Understood in terms of modern international relations, this doctrine encouraged the notion that states lie above and beyond any form of legal regulation in their interactions with each other.
[9] Regarding pertinent international law, this can be customary as well as conventional. Article 38(1)(b) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice describes international custom as “evidence of a general practice accepted as law.” 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993 (June 26, 1945). The norms of customary international law bind all states irrespective of whether a State has ratified the pertinent codifying instrument or convention. International law compartmentalizes apparently identical rights and obligations arising both out of customary law and treaty law. “Even if two norms belonging to two sources of international law appear identical in content, and even if the states in question are bound by these rules both on the level of treaty-law and on that of customary international law, these norms retain a separate existence.” See Military and Paramilitary Activities (Nicaragua v. U.S.), 1986 I.C.J. Rep. 14, para. 178 (June 27).
[10] Seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarks prophetically in 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. Familiar to Spinoza, much of this effort was founded upon certain then-familiar Jewish sources.
[11] See: Louis René Beres, Harvard Law School: https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/
[12] Modern philosophic origins of “will” are discoverable in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration, Schopenhauer drew freely upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely and perhaps more importantly upon Schopenhauer. Goethe was also a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, author of the singularly prophetic twentieth-century work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas;1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the centenary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948) and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).
[13] In this connection, consider the terse insight by philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962): “Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” In our present context, “new ones” concern the imperative replacement “paradigm” for global power politics or realpolitik.
[14]See, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/
[15] See earlier books, by this author, offering more detailed visions of such an imperative escape. See especially: Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis (1973); Louis René Beres, Transforming World Politics: The National Roots of World Peace (1975); 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).
[16] Unless we take meaningful steps to implement an organic and cooperative planetary civilization – one based on the irremediably central truth of human “oneness” – there will ultimately be no civilization at all. States have generally acted on very different assumptions, expecting, inter alia, that in this war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes), one state’s advantage is necessarily another’s disadvantage. What they have consistently failed to understand is that such apparent gains and losses have always been short-term or transient.
[17] As we may learn from ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “”You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of such “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE; with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality.” By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking at Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide necessary background for the eternal drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world correctly considered as a part rather than whole. Says Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today the idea of human oneness discussed here can be justified and explained in more expressly secular terms of analytic understanding.
[18] Sigmund Freud maintained general antipathy to all things American. In essence, he most strenuously objected, per Bruno Bettelheim, to this country’s “shallow optimism” and its seemingly corollary commitment to crude forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was evidently “lacking in soul.” See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.
[19] See, by this author, at Daily Princetonian, Louis René Beres: https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education
[20] Sometimes the difficulty is described in scholarly literature as the “prisoner’s dilemma” or “problem of the commons.” See, for example, by this author, Louis René Beres, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity and the Tragedy of the Commons,” The Western Political Quarterly, 1973. https://www.jstor.org/stable/447141#:~:text=BIPOLARITY%2C%20MULTIPOLARITY%2C%20AND%20THE%20TRAGEDY%20OF%20THE%20COMMONS,of%20the%20most%20under-examined%20problems%20of%20inter-national%20studies.
[21] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Modern Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/06/08/perceptions-of-credibility-existential-hazards-of-russian-nuclear-doctrine/
[22] Explicit application of the law of war to insurgent forces dates to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. As more than codified treaties and conventions must comprise the law of war, it is plain that the obligations of jus in bello (justice in war) are part of “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” (from Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice) and thereby bind all categories of belligerents. (See Statute of the International Court of Justice, art. 38, June 29, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. 993). Further, Hague Convention IV of 1907 declares that even in the absence of a precisely published set of guidelines regarding “unforeseen cases,” the operative pre-conventional sources of humanitarian international law obtain and still govern all belligerency. The related Martens Clause is included in the Preamble of the 1899 Hague Conventions, International Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War by Land, July 29, 1899, 187 Consol. T.S. 429, 430.
[23] War and genocide need not be considered as mutually exclusive. War might well become the means whereby genocide is undertaken. According to Articles II and III of the Genocide Convention, which entered into force on January 12, 1951, genocide includes any of several listed acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such….” See Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Done at New York, Dec. 9, 1948. Entered into force, Jan. 12, 1951. 78 U.N.T.S. 277.
[24] A similar line of reasoning is advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. On this elucidating parable known generally as the “Stag Hunt, see: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3218711
[25] Interestingly, says Jose Ortega y’ Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958): “History is an illustrious war against death.”
[26] The idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is a current variant – has never really been more than a facile and perilous metaphor. In fact, it has never had anything to do with ascertaining true equilibrium. As such a balance is always a matter of individual and more-or-less subjective perceptions, adversary states can never be sufficiently confident that identifiable strategic circumstances are “balanced” in their favor. In consequence, each side perpetually fears that it will be left behind; the corresponding search for balance produces ever wider patterns of insecurity, disequilibrium and armed conflict.
[27] Dostoyevsky inquires: “What is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I’d say, is to 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 enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened. Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.” See: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground 108 (Andrew R. MacAndrew, trans., New American Library,1961) (1862).
[28] “There is no longer a virtuous nation,” warns the poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candlelight.” A corollary question was raised by Jose Ortega y’ Gasset in 1925: “Where,” the Spanish philosopher queried, “shall we find the material to reconstruct the world?” See Ortega’s The Dehumanization of Art (1925) (1968) by Princeton University Press, p. 129.
[29] See Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This book preceded Smith’s much better-known The Wealth of Nations (1776).
[30] In Tragic Sense of Life, Basque philosopher Miguel De Unamuno identifies an indissoluble “association” between those who would unite together against a common foe – most importantly, human mortality. Similar in part to Sigmund Freud’s “spontaneous sympathy” of souls, Unamuno’s argument is that any universal fear of death can produce “pity” or genuine compassion between peoples, and that this common apprehension can be harnessed to fashion a more harmonious world order. This is not a lesson that can easily be used to change a leading nation’s pragmatic foreign policy directions; nonetheless, it does point convincingly toward more serious thinking about world affairs.
[31] For generic assessments of the probable consequences of nuclear war fighting by this author, see: Louis René Beres, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd. ed., 2018); Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington MA; Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, ed., Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1986).
[32] Regarding Vladimir Putin’s personal responsibility for egregious crimes, it is important to note that the responsibility of leaders for pertinent 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.
[33] “National security strategy” is not the same as “national security doctrine.” Doctrine sets the stage for strategy. It identifies various central beliefs that must subsequently animate any actual “order of battle.” Among other things,doctrine describes underlying general principles on how a particular war ought to be waged. The reciprocal task forstrategy is to adapt as required in order to best support previously-fashioned doctrine. Doctrine represents the required framework from which proper strategic goals should be suitably extrapolated. Generically, in “standard” or orthodox military thinking, such doctrine describes the tactical manner in which national forces ought to fight in various combat situations, the prescribed “order of battle,” and variously assorted corollary operations. The literal definition of “doctrine” derives from Middle English, from the Latin doctrina, meaning teaching, learning, and instruction. Always, a central importance of codified doctrine lies not only in the way it can animate, unify and optimize pertinent military forces, but also in the way it can transmit certain desired “messages” to an enemy.
[34] This intellectually barren sentiment was first made explicit by Mr. Trump immediately prior to his “Trump I”(June 12, 2018) Singapore Summit with Kim Jung Un.
[35] We may learn from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “One ought never seek the Higher Man in the marketplace.”
[36] In this connection recalling Karl Jaspers’ discussions of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (1935): “The rational is not thinkable without its other, the non-rational, and it never appears in reality without it. The only question is, in what form the other appears, how it remains in spite of all, and how it is to be grasped.”
[37] A properly antecedent question was raised by Jose Ortega y’Gasset in 1925: “Where,” the Spanish philosopher queried, “shall we find the material to reconstruct the world?” See Ortega’s The Dehumanization of Art (1925) (1968) by Princeton University Press, p. 129.
[38] This classical work was well-known to the Founding Fathers of the United States, and figured closely in the creation of the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
[39] Those readers who might be inclined to probe such ideas at a more deeply philosophical level, may wish to consider Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man (1955): “Since the inner face of the world is manifest deep within our human consciousness, and there reflects upon itself, it would seem that we have only got to look at ourselves in order to understand the dynamic relationships existing between the within and the without of things….”
[40] The Complete Aeschylus: The Oresteia 146 (Peter Burian & Alan Shapiro, eds., 2nd ed., 2011; presenting the ending of Agamemnon.
[41] It ought never to be overlooked that international law has always been a part of US domestic law, both by virtue of the Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause” (Article VI) and of several major US Supreme Court decisions. The words of Mr. Justice Gray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900), are instructive: “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)).The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”
[42] 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. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.
[43] The concept of “world order” – as an organizing dimension of scholarship and as a normative goal of international affairs – has its contemporary intellectual origins in the work of Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal at the Yale Law School, Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn’s WORLD PEACE THROUGH WORLD LAW (1966) and the large body of writings by Richard A. Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz. For selected early works by this author, who was an original participant in the World Law Fund’s World Order Models Project (WOMP) at Princeton in the late 1960s, see: Louis René Beres and Harry R. Targ, CONSTRUCTING ALTERNATIVE WORLD FUTURES: REORDERING THE PLANET (1977); Louis René Beres and Harry R. Targ., eds., PLANNING ALTERNATIVE WORLD FUTURES: VALUES, METHODS AND MODELS (1975); Louis René Beres, PEOPLE, STATES AND WORLD ORDER (1981); 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).
[44] See Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying (2009).
[45] In this spirit, see also Nietzsche’s complementary comment in Zarathustra, “…it is for the superfluous that the state was invented” and Jose Ortega y’Gasset’s observation in The Revolt of the Masses (1932): “The state is the greatest danger….,” mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it – disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, in industry.”
[46] See Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as quoted by Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th ed., 2 vols, Princeton New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1963, vol.2, p. 31. In a similar vein, as part of his posthumously published Lectures on Politics (1896), Heinrich von Treitschke, citing to Johan Gottlieb Fichte, opines: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Though widely neglected, this is an opinion of generally unimaginable intellectual potency.
[47] Says Emmanuel Levinas in God, Death and Time (2000): “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.”
[48] In law, states must judge every use of force twice: once with regard to the underlying right to wage war (jus ad bellum) and once with regard to the means used in actually conducting war (jus in bello). Following the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the United Nations Charter, there can be absolutely no right to aggressive war. However, the long-standing customary right of post-attack self-defense remains codified at Article 51 of the UN Charter. Similarly, subject to conformance, inter alia, with jus in bello criteria, certain instances of humanitarian intervention and collective security operations may also be consistent with jus ad bellum. The law of war, the rules of jus in bello, comprise: (1) laws on weapons; (2) laws on warfare; and (3) humanitarian rules. Codified primarily at The Hague and Geneva Conventions, these rules attempt to bring discrimination, proportionality and military necessity into all belligerent calculations.
[49] See, on such complex conceptual argument, René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972).
[50] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2024/11/forcing-ukraine-to-negotiate-for-territory-seized-by-russia-would-violate-international-us-law/
[51] Under international law, the question of whether or not a condition of war actually exists between states is often left unclear. Traditionally, a war was said to exist only when am adversarial state first issued a formal declaration of war. The Hague Convention III codified this position in 1907. This Convention provided that hostilities must not commence without “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. See Hague Convention III on the Opening of Hostilities, Oct. 18, 1907, art. 1, 36 Stat. 2277, 205 Consol. T.S. 263. Presently, a declaration of war may be tantamount to a declaration of criminality because international law prohibits aggression. See Treaty Providing for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, Aug. 27, 1948, art. 1, 46 Stat. 2343, 94 L.N.T.S. 57 (also called Pact of Paris or Kellogg-Briand Pact); Nuremberg Judgment, 1 I.M.T. Trial of the Major War Criminals 171 (1947), portions reprinted in Burns H. Weston, et. al., INTERNATIONAL LAW AND WORLD ORDER 148, 159 (1980); U.N. Charter, art. 2(4). A state may compromise its own legal position by announcing formal declarations of war. It follows that a state of belligerency may exist without formal declarations, but only if there exists an armed conflict between two or more states and/or at least one of these states considers itself “at war.”
[52]More precisely, such reasoning must be fundamentally dialectical. Dialectical reasoning likely originated in Fifth Century BCE Athens, as Zeno, author of the Paradoxes, had been acknowledged by Aristotle as its inventor. Further, in the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophic/analytic method. The dialectician, says Plato, is the “special one” who knows how to ask and answer vital questions.
[53] In the words of 20th century philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man (1955): “The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature….”
[54] The Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) observes: “Man’s heart is in his weapons….in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself….”
[55] In a similar vein, notes Guillaume 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.” See this poet’s The New Spirit and the Poets (1917).
[56] “The rational is not thinkable without its other,” says Karl Jaspers in Reason and Existenz (1935), “and it never appears in reality without it.” Today, examining Vladimir Putin’s egregious crimes against Ukraine, this philosophical statement points inter alia to a possible Russian strategy of “pretended irrationality.” Whether genuine or pretended, considerations of rationality represent an integral part of all nuclear deterrence calculations in world politics.
