Thinking about war

In one of the very first posts here on Rawls & Me, I remarked that the world would probably have been somewhat more forgiving towards Bill Clinton for his saxophone adventures with Miss Lewinsky, had it only known what would follow (i.e. the trauma of the Bush years). The same can probably be said about the remaining US hegemony. As much as all my friends on the Left in Europe take any opportunity they can to criticize the United States, I am not sure they would be particularly happy in a world without it.

Such thoughts come very naturally here. As I noted in my last post, I am less than a hundred kilometres from the North Korean border. In one sense, all this is just a collective psychosis – any sane person would immediately wake up and stop it. But sixty years of Stalinism do not produce sane people.

In a perverse, Herman Kahn–ish way of thinking, I must admit that I am sometimes thankful that the United States poses a credible existential threat to North Korea – that its leaders know that any attempt to attack the South, particularly with nuclear weapons, would turn the North into gravel and ashes within hours. But as a Christian, I cannot accept that kind of logic and, more importantly, what it does to me. I am a pacifist because I believe that killing, even under the cloak of war, is murder. At the same time, as a Christian, I firmly believe that sacrifice is sometimes required, that we must be bold when confronted with evil – that if we resort to arms, we will lose ourselves.

I often like to think that war is a dying business – that as the world comes together through globalization, we will abolish war and make good on the cosmopolitan promise of one moral and political community of humanity. But if anything, the last decade has been a reminder of how far we actually are from reaching that point. The countless lives that have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that the absence of military force might, in some cases, have been more effective in toppling authoritarian regimes (as witnessed during the Arab Spring). I do not know how often I have asked myself why the United States does not believe in its own values, why it chooses to torture people rather than bring them to justice, why it does not open its borders to the world rather than closing them. But as Europeans, we tend to ask more of the United States than we are capable of ourselves. All the possibilities are on our own doorstep as well: why do we not bring Turkey into the European Union? Why did we let the fear of “social tourism” obscure the shared possibilities for growth when Poland and the other Central European countries joined in 2004? And why do we keep building new prisons rather than schools at home?

When thinking about the century ahead, none of this can be separated from the ecological challenge we are facing. Looking back at the monumental changes of the 20th century, it is at least to me self-evident that we must project a positive future – one of universal affluence rather than scarcity, one that can inspire people without requiring them to submit to a single epistemology (such as belief in the reality of climate change). Many green theorists seem willing to accept the deaths of billions of people in order to carry out their great project of homogenization. In their world, there are no BMW owners, no people who like flying overseas, no dreams of one day moving to the stars. For them, it is all a moral quest to demonstrate their own ideological purity. But we cannot have that world. We need a world of compromises, of dialogue and debate, and most of all, we need slow and pragmatic change so that we can learn from what goes wrong.

And if that is so, then we need a vision – one that can speak to the highest in us, that can show us what we can become if we believe in ourselves and in our abilities. A vision that can also inspire those people far away in America who are right now drawing up yet another war plan for the Korean peninsula and who, I suspect, do not lose much sleep over global warming.