The Logic of Nuclear Arms

On the eve of a nuclear arms treaty with Iran, the nature of which I cannot guess at, my shopping trip musings turned to the logic of nuclear arms. The general background, I learned later, is that we have nations with nuclear arms, nations without them, and one nation (Israel) which will not say so one way or the other. There is a major treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 1968, to which most nations are signatories except North Korea; North Korea had once been a signatory but then withdrew. Four nations have never signed NPT: India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan. Of those outside the NPT, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have nuclear warms; South Sudan has none; Israel is believed to have them.

Iran is a signatory but believed to be in violation of the NPT.

Now the logic seems to be, here, that some nations are “grandfathered in” and thus no one disputes their ownership. Others fall, through alliances, under the protection of those who do. Iran is something of an exception, being the sole major Sh’ia nation and not a member of a recognized bloc. But it is geographically also close to Israel, a nation with an ambiguous status, but most closely allied with the United States. Therefore Iran is the target of very, very special oversight. But why? Because it threatens Israel? That assumption is at least logical.

Nothing else is in this context. If nuclear arms are so dangerous, why may so many have them. Why is no pressure placed on India to rid itself of such arms? Is that because it is aligned to the West, more or less?

I wonder what would happen if Iran withdrew from the NPT. It would at least make logical sense, in a way, because no one seems intent on attacking India, Pakistan, or even North Korea. So the problem seems to be—Israel. And its ambiguous status. Maybe they are the chosen people. And Truman must have known that when he finally agreed to impose an Israeli state on Palestinian territory—or was Palestine a British Colony then? I better stop before I drown in an overflow of muddy logic.

Lucky and not so Lucky Elections

Very little time actually passes when we are not again reminded that we live in a fallen world. Things are getting back to normal. The cynical response to this, of course, is merely to shrug, but invariably “normalcy” means that children are being killed needlessly somewhere. We have the teaching to guide us (Matthew 19:14): “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” The Golan Heights heat up as if there was a volcano there. And Israel is mobilizing to defend itself against that Goliath of Palestine, the dirt-poor Gaza strip. Of course it is election time in Israel, and that might have some causative effect (see, for instance, link). And we may call ourselves lucky that children are not routinely killed every time we go to the polls. But such good fortune does not please if our context is humanity.

Sand You Were and Sand You Will Become

The clash of great collectives, thus cultures and civilizations, is a fascinating story with discernible laws of their own, but the subject interests at most one person in multiple thousands. We’re time-bound. Our time horizons are quite short, at most years, usually much shorter. Virtually nobody wonders how things will look a century, never mind three centuries hence.

I’m thinking now of the oil-rich Arab countries in the first instance. They belong to the Muslim culture; it is younger than the Western. It originated in the seventh, the Western (Christendom) in the forth century. I date the first to 632 when Muhammed died and the second to Constantine’s ascension or, more specifically, to the Edict of Milan in 312. Younger, older.

Cultural clashes make winners and losers, and to some extent the outcomes are predictable. A mature civilization encroaching on a relatively primitive culture spells the domination of the primitive by the mature—and often, when primitives are not very numerous (such was the case in Europe’s invasion of America) the virtual wipe-out of the primitive. When both cultures are in their growth phase, the older will more likely win if all else is equal. This has been the case in the clash between the West and the Muslim culture. Therefore it is we who established Israel in Palestine. It is we who’re “nation-building” in Iraq and in Afghanistan rather than, say, The Caliphate nation-building in Texas or in Florida.

The Romans expanded northward and subjected what today is France and England; they also warred against the Germans like we war against Afghanistan—not quite succeeding—and found little footing east of the Rhine.

When a decadent civilization is up against a younger one it is ultimately overrun, but the younger of the two will absorb the culture of those that it conquers. Thus Germanic tribes eventually overran Rome. Thus also the Mongols under Kublai Khan conquered China. The English conquered India, a decadent civilization, that had been overrun earlier by the Muslims. China was less decadent. It was somewhat “opened,” meaning to trade, by the Opium Wars, but it was never colonized like India; and now, rising, when it looks out onto the world, it is not through westernized eyes.

Now what lies ahead of us in the long run—and there is no need to worry, it won’t affect most people living now—is that the Western decadence will deepen just as fossil fuels run out. Muslim populations are already, as I write, interlacing western populations in Europe, including England; they are notorious for breeding, resisting integration, and heeding their mullahs. When the oil wells dry up, great transformations, and confusions, will preoccupy the “developed” world—most endangered by its vast reliance on fossil fuels. The Arab countries, where all of the world’s attention is now, will become what they have once been—mostly sand. And our vital interest in maintaining Israel, our de-facto 51st state, will become almost indiscernible; we’ll be too busy learning to farm and to weave. What will then become of that outpost of the Western world embedded there, by force, in the midst of the Muslim culture? Will Israel conquer the sand or will the sand conquer Israel?

Righteous Indignation

Reading the news of departing Defense Secretary Gates’ comments concerning NATO members this morning, oddly perhaps, produced associations in me of a Wolf Blitzer interview with former President Carter some years ago. Gates criticized NATO countries of lack of enthusiasm in supporting the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The most quoted part of his speech follows:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.

The NATO defensive alliance came to be formed, largely at U.S. initiative, to prevent Europe falling into the hands of the Communists. Thus it was de facto an anti-Russian alliance, but legally requires members to come to the aid of any other member nation that is attacked. Now a cold and sober view of today’s situation makes European reluctance to spend heavily on the Afghan war, be it bodies or money, quite understandable. The 9/11 attack on the United States was not by a state actor but by a terrorist group, it took place just shy of ten years ago. In that attack approximately 3,000 people lost their lives and several buildings were destroyed. The American response to this event has been way, way too excessive. It has spawned two costly wars of which Iraq was never linked to the 9/11 attack; the second began as an invasion of a country where the terrorists were located and trained their operatives. That war went far beyond destroying training camps and killing or dispersing the terrorists; it has morphed into a neo-imperialist venture under the new name of nation building.

At minimum Gates’ demands for heavy European participation in the Afghan war stretches the meaning of military alliance to unrecognizable shape. It has come to mean supporting U.S. military efforts, wherever they might take place and for whatever reason—just because, for reasons of our own, not out of any gratitude, we put airfields and troops all over Europe once to keep Europe from going communist.

So why does the Blitzer-Carter interview pop into my mind? Turns out that Gates’ speech and that interview have a common feature. They both represent distortions in reality. The New York Times positions the Gates’ story as righteous and appropriate. Blitzer displayed the same aggressive righteousness in using, back then, what struck me as an almost insulting tone when he interviewed President Carter. The occasion was Carter’s publication of a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book came out on November 14, 2006. The interview in CNN’s so-called Situation Room, took place on November 28. Carter had dared to look at Israeli behavior realistically and soberly rather than politically correctly. That last stance requires that Israeli behavior must always be presented as justified and right, whether it is or is not. Similarly the U.S. position and view of reality must always be seen as correct and right even when it has drifted into collective insanity.

That Peculiar Relationship

As I reached maturity, my thinking about international relations was much influenced by George F. Kennan, a one-time ambassador to Moscow, a sober and rational diplomat, later a marginalized factor in government but an influential academic. He advocated a kind of self-evident doctrine of the spheres of influence. Nations have interests, and they defend these the more important they are to their survival. Defense of territories, their own or adjacent, and defense of resources (access to oil, grain, or the freedom of the seas) being primary interests. Kennan therefore frowned on the pursuit of so-called idealistic ventures like the promotion of freedom and democracy abroad. President Wilson was not one of his heroes. This view pleased me. It was realistic, rational, and marked by a kind of sane humility. Such a doctrine was at the core of George Washington’s foreign policies as well.

Later, over the years, I realized that this straight-forward doctrine based on national interest is deformed not only by idealistic crusades and dangerous temptations of empire (e.g., globalism); no; it is also deformed by a powerful cultural tendency present in international affairs based on collective memory, heritage, and so-called values. This element is what produces irrational, “special,” and “peculiar” relationships—like the relationship between the United States and Israel.

Its roots ultimately go back to the clash between Christianity and Islam, the Crusades. I don’t for a minute blame the Muslims for harking back to it. That peculiar relationship with Israel is a secularized modern version of a clash of cultures that continues still—but disguised by new phrases like…well, like freedom and democracy.

Israel began by waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine; the earlier waves took place under the still prevailing Ottoman empire. Pogroms and persecution in Europe drove Jews to Palestine—and under an umbrella that was at least mildly accepting of all “People of the Book.” The Ottomans were still in charge when Theodor Herzl published his book, The State of the Jews, in 1896. The British occupied Palestine aided by battalions of Zionist volunteers during World War I. In 1917 came the Balfour declaration—projecting, without calling it a state, what Herzl had imagined:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

In such a declaration, I would suggest, the Muslim majority residing in Palestine was viewed roughly in the same way by the British as the American Indians were viewed by the immigrants who had “discovered” America. Under the British Mandate (1920), officially a grant of power by the League of Nations, violent clashes developed between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine. A minority (the Jews had 11% of the population in 1922) of largely European background—but, itself marginalized in Europe—was aiming to consolidate its power over a population that seemed not to register on any international scale to have any weight at all. Later, after World War II, and another rather massive upheaval of antisemitism in Europe, Truman’s support of Israeli statehood, crucial in the U.N., imposed a state on a region the people of which had not been consulted to vote in any plebiscite. So much for freedom and democracy.

The “special” relationship—thus between England and America—helped produce the “peculiar” relationship between America and Israel. I detect nothing resembling “national interest” here. Israel is neither strategically nor tactically important; and most of it, alas, is desert. But what there is, and plenty of it, is a cultural feeling and centuries of lingering enmity. Israel therefore is a modern, secular footprint inside the borders of the Muslim world, a beachhead, as it were, reminiscent of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in crusader days, which lasted from 1099 to 1291. Our being there lacks rhyme and reason, at least as George Kennan might have seen the matter. But then we aren’t rational, are we? So the chaos will keep churning on, the strange dance will continue. We are the big and successful boy of Britain, grown up and mighty. And we have this nasty but willful problem child we tolerate and fund, to the tune of $3 billion a year—much as Saddam Hussein once tolerated and forgave his nasty son Uday.