As Americans struggle to endure “Trump II,” all nation-states should think beyond traditional foreign policies of “everyone for himself.” In essence, this universal obligation concerns the futile and flawed human inclination to base personal and collective survival on power politics. To satisfy this obligation – a legal and strategic requirement for all states that coexist uneasily in our Westphalian “state of nature” – there will need to be far deeper understandings of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “What does not benefit the entire hive [here, world legal order] is no benefit to the bee” [here, the individual nation-state]. More than any other powerful state, this ancient philosophical imperative pertains to Trump Era United States.
Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, world politics have been shaped by sovereignty-centered belligerence. Considered over time, especially as the technologies of global destruction become more widespread and indiscriminate, this seventeenth-century system of competitive nationalism can never be gainful. Instead, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of a sea, entire countries could be erased.
What should be done, especially by major powers now facing-off amid the gratuitous rancor of “Trump II?” It’s not just an important question; conceivably, it is the single most bewildering and meaningful query of modern times. National leaders will need to plan rationally and self-consciously for nothing less than global survival. Among other things, this signifies a new and challenging willingness to realign national-interests with wider interests of humankind. Though this requirement will at first appear fanciful or unrealistic, nothing could be less pragmatic than remaining on the current collision course.
There is more. If left unopposed or modified by merely token kinds of reform, world politics will experience more frequent and more catastrophic breakdowns. To call for still-further hardenings of world “tribal conflict” – the present dissembling “call” of Donald Trump’s “America First” – would be to reject everything we have ought to have learned about law, civilization, and species survival.
In broad contours, at least, it’s not complicated. Unless we finally take serious steps to implement an organically cooperative planetary civilization – one based on the irremediably central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all. Inter alia, to reject this conclusion would mean to surrender to potentially worldwide spasms of proliferation and nuclearization. Right now, as nation-states struggle in the midst of escalating Trump II incoherence, any such surrender could be existential.
The imperative nature of this assessment is clarified by our species’ manifest “advances” in mega-weapons and corresponding infrastructures. Augmenting these ironic examples of progress, certain major states are becoming increasingly committed to deterrence-centered strategies of nuclear war fighting, cyber-warfare and/or “internet mercenaries.” To a meaningful extent, the steady spread of internet warfare surrogates is being undertaken on behalf of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.
It’s time for candor. Jurisprudentially, we are still at the beginning of an indispensable task. Until now, in such starkly primal matters, we humans have consistently managed to miss what is really important. Nonetheless, this central truth is easily expressed: There is a latent but determinative “oneness” to all world politics.
There is more. The critical dimension of human oneness can be encountered in certain vital but generally-ignored literatures, among such philosophic giants as Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This dimension’s persistent rejection in “real life,” even by the world’s allegedly great universities, reflects an elemental threat to literally every nation-state’s physical survival.
Certain antecedent questions should now be raised. Why have we made ourselves existentially vulnerable? The lucid and correct answer would reveal a continuous worldwide desperation to seek personal identity in“membership.”
Everything begins with the individual, with the microcosm. We humans generally fear solitude or “aloneness” more than anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death. Accordingly, amid a Trump II chaos that is already stampeding across continents, we most willingly abide loyalty to primal claims of “tribe.” Always, everywhere, irrespective of peremptory expectations of law, individuals desperate to “belong” subordinate themselves to variously destructive expectations of nation, class or faith.
More often than we might first care to admit, such subordination carries with it some acceptance of “martyrdom.” Recalling the marooned English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we may be reminded here that the veneer of human civilization is inevitably razor thin. Vastly impressive scientific and medical discoveries aside, whole swaths of humankind remain fiercely dedicated to assorted variants of “sacrifice.” In the end, it is precisely such an atavistic dedication that best explains war, terrorism and genocide.
Still, as a species, we remain determinedly irrational? Why? The best answer seemingly lies in our manifestly shortsighted views of “realism.” In the clarifying light of history, such views are strange and incomprehensible. Not until the twentieth century, after all, did international law even bother to criminalize aggressive war.
Hope exists, we should always assume, but during Trump II it must sing much more softly, with circumspection, inconspicuously, almost sotto voce. Though counter-intuitive, especially in the battered United States, the time for celebrating gleaming new technologies is at least partially over. To survive together on this realpolitik imperiled planet, all should struggle to discover an individual life that is detached from felt obligations to “belong.” It is only after such an elemental discovery that we could reasonably hope to reconstruct world politics and law on a sound basis. This means, above all, a willing foundation of global interdependence and human “oneness.”
In his landmark work, The Decline of the West, first published during World War I, Oswald Spengler inquires: “Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?” This remains a profound and pivotal query. The necessary answer would accept that the suffocating conflicts of life on earth can never be undone by undermining global economies, building larger missiles, abrogating international treaties, replacing one sordid regime with another, or “common sense.”
Eventually, we could learn that our historically-tribal planet lacks a tolerable future not because we have been too slow to learn what has been taught, but because what has been taught has generally been beside the point. There would be no compelling assurances of planetary survival if even great majorities managed to acquire shiny new “personal devices” or own cars that drive themselves. Ipso facto, these are false and injurious goals.
There is more. Traditional “remedies” would prove insufficient because the planet as a whole remains locked on a lethal trajectory of belligerent nationalism. Today, the primary source of such species-defiling falsity is power politics in expressly Trump II manifestations. A tangible way to reduce such insidious manifestations would be for the United States to stand with the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression rather than Vladimir Putin, and to cease grievously lawless presidential threats against Panama, Greenland, Mexico and potentially even Canada.
