“When you have listened to Reason, it is wise to agree that all things are one.” -Heraclitus, Fragments
In world politics, nothing is disconnected. Though specific events, personalities and technologies may appear to “stand alone,” they ultimately coalesce into one all-embracing structure of power and authority. It follows that if the systemic anarchy birthed at the 1648 Peace of Westphalia continues to unravel, all states and peoples will be forced to confront an incessant chaos.[1]
There are many explanatory particulars. Amid current wars and threatened aggressions,[2] all global powers remain focused on immediate security threats (both real and imagined), not on longer-term world-system transformations. For the most part, such policy shortsightedness is understandable. Still, humankind’s chronic indifference to fundamental security obligations suggests that no traditional remedies could “work” over time. Significantly, especially at this moment of intense concern over autonomous superintelligence, this prognosis would remain valid even if every national leadership were well-intentioned and technically rational. Here, rationality means decision-making that consistently values national survival over any other preference or combination of preferences.
A medical metaphor can offer some further clarification. We may think of circumstances where a single patient’s disease is being treated as an isolable harm rather than organic pathology. Prima facie, such treatment would “miss the point.” When dealing with ongoing disease processes, it makes little sense to tackle singular symptoms without first identifying systemic origins.
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To deal with variously manifested “pathologies” of world politics, capable thinkers should immediately acknowledge underlying elements of interrelatedness. As in the case of an individual human being, world politics should be assessed as an organic “whole.” In essence, this network of force-multiplying systems is always more complex than the apparent sum of its “parts.”[3]
It’s the eleventh hour. What should be done to rescue an imperiled planet from continuous self-delusion? Are visionary suggestions for transformative world order reform unrealistic ipso facto? In deference to Reason (ancient Greek philosophers called this “logos”), such suggestions are inherently more realistic than staying true to a fatally-flawed geopolitics. Accordingly, we may purposefully recall the succinct wisdom of Italian film director Federico Fellini: “The visionary is the only realist.”
There is more. The overall challenge to survival in world politics is not “merely” conceptual. There are stubbornly complicated details to be identified and managed. In certain foreseeable cases, particularly in the rapidly-dissembling Trump Era, predictable failures of “Westphalian” international lawwould not only be catastrophic. They would also be unprecedented.
What would happen next? The answer, though not narrowly jurisprudential, lies “beyond any reasonable doubt.” Recalling Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt: “The worst does sometimes happen.”
For every nation’s foreign policy planners, it is high time to take science seriously, not just for justifications of space travel and self-driving cars, but for the prevention of nuclear war. Ipso facto, a coinciding question needs to be raised: “What if we should find ourselves in an authentic nuclear crisis?” Such portentous queries lie latent not just in Russian, Chinese, and North Korean activities, but also in conspicuously incoherent policies announced by the President of the United States.
Soon, all states, but especially those that rely on some forms of nuclear deterrence, should think imaginatively and scientifically about alternative structures of world politics. While even the tiniest reference to global unification or integration (what French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls “planetization”) will be dismissed as fanciful, such operational “oneness” also represents humankind’s only residual opportunity to “stay alive.” More succinctly, if left unrevised, the still-ascending “every man for himself” ethos in world politics will spawn a pitiless providence.
What are reasonably foreseeable narratives? At some not yet decipherable point, world system failures could become intolerable and irreversible. For the moment, of course, it could still be selectively rational for states to use military force against dangerous enemies, foes that are sovereign states and/or sub-state terror organizations. In the longer term, however, the only sort of realism that could make intellectual and moral sense in global survival terms would seek a generalized acceptance of global “oneness.” Underscoring this Reason-based argument would be continuously verifiable failures of “Westphalian” or “balance-of-power” world politics.[4]
For deciphering the essential elements of a Reason-based world civilization, “oneness” need not be a bewildering concept. Inter alia, it is hardly a biological secret that the factors and behaviors common to all human activity greatly outnumber those elements that differentiate one planetary segment from another. Unless the leaders of all major states can finally understand that the durable survival of any one country is contingent on the survival of all, true national security will remain far beyond everyone’s tangible grasp. This incontestable conclusion is as true for the “powerful” United States, Russia and China as for the “weak” states in world politics.
In any event, this is not a time for despair. There still remain variously viable opportunities for world order visionaries and wise national leaders. To a determinable extent, these opportunities lie latent in the foundational insights of Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Karl Jaspers and Lewis Mumford: “Civilization,” Mumford sums it all up, “is the never ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”
There is more. “Powerful” states ought never allow themselves to be lulled into any sleep of Reason by delusionary calls for military “victory.” Taking humankind in its entirety, the only triumph worth celebrating would be one that transports an already-chaotic planetary politics beyond institutionalized hatreds and doctrinal anti-Reason.
Among too-many other derelictions, the current American president’s deep-seated attachment to law-violating aggressions undermines Reason-based international relations. The clearest example of this destructive attachment is Donald Trump’s de facto support of Putin aggressions against Ukraine.[5] Under authoritative international law, these aggressions represent Nuremberg-level crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.[6]
Immediately, policy-makers and scholars will need to think more urgently and systemically about alternative world futures. Otherwise, an entire planet will suffer grievously from the remorseless “Westphalian legacy,” a continuously-defiling inheritance of war, terrorism and genocide. At some no-longer distant point, we are reminded by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Durrenmatt, “The worst does sometimes happen.[7]
A final imperative about Reason.” While it might sound banal, time is finally “running out.” Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment philosopher so important to 18th century American political thought, once wrote prophetically: “The majority of nations, as well as of men, are tractable only in their youth. They become incorrigible as they grow old.” Today, such incorrigibility is conspicuous and “normal.”
It’s time for summation. When understood in terms of humankind’s obligation to replace belligerent nationalism with a unifying world politics, this responsibility contains an important corollary: Though residual survival options may remain within our grasp, they would be transient, fleeting and partial.
For a species in mortal peril, there can be only one meaningful solution. It lies in replacing a rapidly ascendant Chaos with a potentially healing Reason. Whatever else certain national leaders would have us believe, Heraclitus’ ancient wisdom of NI (Natural Intelligence) still rings true: “…all things are one.”
[1] During chaos, which is a “time of War,” says English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Chapter XIII (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery.”): “… every man is Enemy to every man… and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” At the time of his writing Leviathan, Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition among individual human beings. This is because of what he called the “dreadful equality” of individual persons in nature, an equality concerning the presumed ability to kill others. Now, however, this once-meaningful differentiation has disappeared with the continuously-prospective spread of nuclear weapons, the spread of artificial intelligence-assisted hacking capabilities and the effectively simultaneous spread of autonomous AI.
[2] US President Donald Trump’s law-violating threats of aggression against Greenland, Denmark, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Cuba, etc., should come immediately to mind. From the standpoint of formal logic, these disjointed threats are examples not of Reason, but of illegitimate appeals to armed force. More precisely, they exemplify the argumentum ad bacculum.
[3] In philosophy of science terminology, this means “synergy.”
[4] The idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is merely a variant – has never been more than a facile metaphor. It has never had anything to do with ascertaining equilibrium. As such, balance is always more-or-less a matter of individual subjective perceptions. Adversarial states can never be sufficiently confident that identifiable strategic circumstances are actually “balanced” in their favor. In consequence, each side must perpetually fear that it will be left behind, creating ever-wider and cascading patterns of insecurity and disequilibrium.
[5] President Trump’s so-called sanctions against Putin invoked in mid-September 2026 are little more than a public-relations gesture directed toward upcoming American elections.
[6] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2018/03/trump-putin-benes/ 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. 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.
[7] See A Dangerous Game
