Outrageous Thoughts on War and Peace

I am going to state my views in pro­vocative form, in the hope of stimulating the broadest possible response.

A recent issue of New Perspectives Quarterly was devoted to the topic, “Superpower without a Cause,” and the articles in it, some of them by leading figures in the formation of American foreign policy in recent decades, show precisely the uncertainty that the topic suggests. This strikes me as bizarre and, worse, ominous. For in my view the cause for which this American superpower must work after the end of the Cold War is clear, if diffi­cult: peace. Most of the writers in the issue would dismiss that comment with, “of course, that is what we were working for all along.” Some of them might even quote Ronald Reagan about “peace through strength.”

But that is just what worries me: So much of the discussion of issues of international order and the control of violence essentially continues the language of the Cold War. But the Cold War was a war, not always so cold, in which tens of thousands of Americans, not to speak of hundreds of thousands of other nationalities, such as Vietnamese, lost their lives.

What we now need is a radical shift, a conversion, a word I use deliberately because it has a religious as well a secular connota­tion. We need a conversion, a metanoia, a turn­ing, from war to peace as our guiding princi­ple and cause. When I read last year that Congress was planning to cut the financing for the Strategic Defense Initiative by $1.6 billion, reducing President Bush’s request for $5.4 billion to $3.8 billion, and all for a project that never made much sense in the first place but now makes no sense at all, then it became clear that we have not made that turn, that we still think in terms of war, not peace.

Make no mistake about it: Thinking in terms of war is very attractive and we will not give it up easily. It has made sense of our world for 50 years; we would be quite bereft without it. What makes war so attractive a framework for our thinking is brilliantly de­scribed in a new manuscript by William Sullivan:

War is among the most revolu­tionary agencies in human experience. By focusing the energies of a popula­tion upon the single goal of victory over the enemy, war can generate a profound sense of common destiny and purpose. World War II instilled in the American population at large the belief that its national purposes em­bodied moral righteousness into an invincible collective power. At the same time, war also brings to the fore instrumental rationality in all its sub­lime, ruthless power. Instrumental thinking concerns itself with means rather than ends…. It asks, relentlessly: How is this approach work­ing? Could it be improved? What kinds of improvement will be most effective for the least cost?

War, then, focuses national purpose and unleashes instrumental reason. The end is given: victory. The means are all we need to think about.

But isn’t all that just fine? Haven’t we won the Cold War and destroyed international Communism in so doing? Here is where I will begin to be really outrageous. I believe the Cold War was a catastrophic mistake. I believe no one won it, but everyone has suffered from it to an extent we are quite unwilling to face, not only the former Soviet Union and the United States, but all the people of the Third World who might have been aided but were not because of what was spent on the Cold War.

Of course the Soviets bear a heavy re­sponsibility for the Cold War. But so do we. It is childish to talk about who started it. George Kennan, who certainly had something to do with mobilizing the American elite to face the Soviet danger, early on warned that we were overreacting enormously, that the Soviets were neither as strong nor as aggressive as our actions implied. But our ruling circles had convinced themselves of the analogy between Nazism and Communism, between the Good War and the Cold War, and the institutional as well as ideological impetus proved unstoppable for decades.

Did the Cold War destroy Soviet Com­munism? That is highly debatable and we may never be sure of the answer. The rigidities in the Soviet economic system led to ever-increas­ing problems that would have proved unman­ageable in any case. Maybe the money spent on armaments hastened the collapse. Maybe it postponed it by giving the Soviet elite the same kind of common purpose that the Cold War gave our elite.

In any case, and here I am sure many readers will think I am exaggerating, the Cold War has come close to destroying the U.S. It has endangered our democratic political system by justifying the creation in the late 1940s of a Stalinist-style national security state within a state that has operated, and still operates, without the constitutional oversight necessary in a democratic society. It has given rise to a doctrine of despotic presidential power in foreign policy that violates the clear wording and intent of the Constitution. Over the dec­ades it has justified a variety of secret actions by government agencies that do not accord with the activities of a democratic government except in times of extreme emergency. That is just the point. Always after a war we disman­tled the centralized despotic state power neces­sary for obtaining victory. But after World War II we extended it for 50 years until it has eaten into the entire structure of our democratic regime.

But the effects on our civil society have been, if anything, worse. We have spent trillions for war, while our physical and social infrastructure crumbled, and our families and schools became dysfunctional and our inner cities uninhabitable. The $5.4 or $3.8 billion spent on Star Wars could make an enormous difference in South-Central Los Angeles, and other such locations in all our major cities, but it is not doing so.

We blandly believe that our system is im­mune to the ills of other societies, that our democracy is safe, that nothing could ever go seriously wrong. Our Founders were not so optimistic. They had grave doubts that our democratic experiment could long endure. They were certain that one of the quickest roads to its demise would be a large, perma­nent standing army. The level of political disil­lusion in America last year was unique in my lifetime. The emergence of David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot was a harbinger of things to come if there is not a basic conver­sion. Not the politics of democracy but the politics of demagogy, plebiscite, and, ultimate­ly, tyranny lie on that road. Who won the Cold War? Some old, nostalgic Communists in Moscow may yet have the last laugh.

What could we have done differently? What can we do now? Let’s take the imagina­tive leap of returning to 1945, to the founding of the United Nations. I am old enough to have been alive then, to have experienced the feeling that we were entering a new world community, that we had a realistic possibility of a world without war. Perhaps if we had developed a peace policy — I do not mean something weak and passive, something like appeasement, but something vigorous, strong, and effective, like a U.N. peace-keeping force with teeth — instead of a war policy, we might have backed the Soviets into a corner much earlier on, instead of engaging in an insane arms race premised on Mutually As­sured Destruction, something that makes no sense at all except in the illogical logic of war.

To make the conversion from war to peace we need to see whole echelons of leadership, who grew up with the logic of war and cannot really make the transition to anything else, removed from public office. That means the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Kirkpatricks, Scowcrofts, Nitzes, and their many less famous colleagues. We need entirely new leadership in the key positions, leadership committed to dismantling the Stalinist national security state within a state and returning foreign policy to its constitutional, democratic basis.

With respect to nuclear weapons, what is required is immediate cessation of testing, and placing enormous pressure on all other nuclear powers to do likewise. It is pointless to talk about stopping nuclear proliferation while we go on testing. Any argument against prolifera­tion can only be based on a commitment to the total elimination of atomic weapons every­where and the establishment of effective in­spection and enforcement mechanisms that can go into any nation, eventually including our own, to discover and if necessary destroy any preparations for the building of atomic weap­ons. What would have seemed wildly unrealis­tic only a few years ago is quite realistic today. Iraq, whatever else it shows, indicates the possibility of inspection and elimination of atomic weapons where there is an internation­al will to do so. The notion that we, or three or five or eight other nations, can go on test­ing and improving our atomic devices while the rest of the world gives up the aspiration to build them is immoral and inherently unwork­able.

But atomic disarmament is only the first plank on a peace agenda. General disarma­ment and international control are the second plank. Now you may think I am really crazy. Last year President Bush announced the sale of fighter planes to Taiwan and Saudi Arabia. We and the Russians and the Czechs and the Chinese continue to pour weapons into the Third World, where they create unbelievable misery and in many cases, Somalia being the most obvious, literal anarchy. If we think we can pacify teenage terrorists in Somalia, why aren’t we able to take the submachine guns and other weapons from the hands of junior high school children in America’s inner cities? Clearly we need a conversion at the highest level of American government from weapons proliferation to disarmament, both at home and abroad.

I will immediately be accused of proposing an utterly utopian policy which would require the U.S. to police the world at great cost in blood and treasure to our own people. How­ever, I am not proposing the U.S. as interna­tional policeman but as leader in creating an effective international consensus that war is an unacceptable instrument of policy, either inter­nationally or domestically.

I speak of effective consensus, consensus, meaning one that is enacted in international law, with effec­tive sanctions, but also in the law and practice of the nations. In the realm of opinion, the consensus has existed for quite some time. In 1936 Walter Lippmann, a well-known realist about foreign policy, wrote:

All great wars are now civil wars. They are not battles against an alien foe but internecine struggles within one closely related, intricately inter­dependent community. Modern war tears apart huge populations which have become dependent upon one an­other for the maintenance of their standard of life — in some degree, for the maintenance of life itself. That is why modern war is so devastating to victor and to vanquished alike.

But while peace involves disarmament, nuclear and conventional, and effective means of monitoring it, that is only the beginning of what it would mean to make peace our cause instead of war. Gaudium et Spes, the central document of Vatican Council II, stated:

Peace is not merely the absence of war. Nor can it be reduced solely to the maintenance of a balance of power between enemies. Nor is it brought about by dictatorship. Instead, it is rightly and appropriately called “an enterprise of justice” (Is. 32:17). Peace results from that harmony built into human society by its divine founder and actualized by men as they thirst after ever greater justice.

Peace, then, involves not only the cessa­tion of conflict, but the active pursuit of right relations between human beings, first of all justice. For Christians it involves more than justice. It involves, to quote the U.S. Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral on peace, “a right rela­tion with God, which entails forgiveness, reconciliation, and union.”

From a Christian point of view, peace in its fullness is an eschatological reality. We cannot expect it fully until the end of time. But according to the doctrine of the Kingdom of God, which is so central to the bishops’ understanding of peace, the reign of God is already breaking into time. Wherever reconciliation is at work — say in El Salvador today — even though there are difficulties and setbacks, the Kingdom is at work.

To put all this in more secular terms, the cause of peace involves not utopian expec­tations but tireless energy in creating interna­tional understandings, agreements, and institu­tions that can begin to build relationships which embody peace (those relationships are not only between human beings but also between human beings and the rest of the biosphere). Those young men in Los Angeles who shouted in the streets after the Rodney King verdict, “No justice, no peace,” were simply telling the truth.

American cities today are excellent met­aphors for our world as a whole. Within them we can see pockets of First World affluence, professional competence, institutions that work. But we can also see pockets of Third World poverty, despair, and institutional col­lapse. As with our cities, so with our nation. We are no longer a city on a hill, as John Winthrop put it, much less a shining city on a hill, as Ronald Reagan put it. We illustrate the human condition of the whole globe in 1993. Do we have a national community? Yes and no. We have some shared values and goals, though there is enormous conflict over what they are and what they mean. But a good society we are not. And just as we are not likely to have good cities without a good nation, we are not likely to have a good nation except in a good world. The world as a community, biologically, economically, political­ly, socially, culturally: We are not very near it, yet that is our project, and the price of failure will be very high, is already very high.

We are an idealistic nation, in spite of the cynicism that has overcome us. We would still like to be a city on a hill. Few of us any longer believe that we can messianically and alone save “the free world,” a phrase that already sounds quaint. It is not messianic to ask of our fellow citizens and our leaders that we begin to put our own house in order, that we bring justice and peace (including domestic disarmament) to our own nation. We have always had the biggest influence on the world as an example, not through our military or political might. Remember the students on Tiananmen Square with their Styrofoam version of the Statue of Liberty.

But in spite of our present beleaguered condition of internal neglect and disarray, we can do more than put our own house in order. We can provide leadership through example and persuasion, not coercion, in establishing a genuinely new world order. We cannot expect to end all violence or to create perfect justice. That is beyond our human capacity and it is arrogant to think otherwise. But it is certainly within our capacity to move much closer to peace and justice than we have done so far. As long as we remain locked in the paradigm of war, the logic that is so familiar to us that we hardly imagine there can be any other, we will make little progress and could indeed slip backward into chaos, which threatens us in many parts of the world, not least in parts of the U.S.

So it is a time for conversion to a new way of thinking, a new logic, the logic of peace, the logic of the Kingdom. If we could make that conversion we could think the previously unthinkable and act in ways we have not done before. If we cannot change, if we have made the logic of war so much a part of our very selves that we can see no other possibility, then it is quite possible that our own system will collapse, just as the Soviet system collapsed, and we could drag a great deal of the world down with us. As Moses said to the children of Israel in his farewell address, “You have set before you life and death,” words echoed by John Winthrop at the very beginning of the American experiment. Both of them urged us to choose life. It is not too late for us to make that choice.