A Peaceful World Won’t Happen By Itself

Originally published at Open Source Politics on 17 October, 2003.

One of the oddest questions in the Arizona Democratic debate last week was this one from an audience member:

I'm wondering if you could comment on why you think there is so much hate for the United States right now and how you would use your position as president to uplift the world to a place that would take us out of that darkness.

I thought Dennis Kucinich had the best response:

[W]e need to reconnect with our real strength, which is to reach out and embrace the world…I have a proposal that's supported by 50 members of Congress to create a Cabinet-level department of peace which seeks to make nonviolence an organizing principle in our society; to tap that capacity we have to evolve; to be better than we are; to look at those issues of domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse; to look at the issues of violence in our communities, racial violence, violence against gays; to believe that we have the capacity through education, working with community groups, to become much better than we are as a nation; to evolve to a point where we can work with the world community to pursue that dream in a world where we can be the ones who work to make war itself archaic.

Okay, some of his phraseology was a little loopy, but no more than any other candidate's off-the-cuff answers to this question. The key point is that we as a nation have always acted on the assumption that our primary means of defense should be violence. That has not stopped violence around the world or in our own country, so perhaps we should try another approach.

As our continuing misadventure in Iraq demonstrates, we haven't been working well in the context of the community of nations. This inability truly threatens our strength in the long run.

Howard Dean was lambasted for wondering aloud if we would always reign supreme militarily. History is replete with examples of great powers that eventually faded away as other nations rose, so that's not an unreasonable expectation. Why should America escape that fate? Do we honestly think that the rest of the world will just sit idly by and allow us to always dominate?

 

Just last month the BBC reported¹:

[T]here's a European challenger to America's GPS supremacy, and after years of Euro-wrangling, the Galileo satellite constellation is about to enter its critical final phase. The European rival is deeply unnerving for the American military.
...
Due to be up and running in five years, and billed as the first wholly-civilian navigation system, Galileo consists of 30 small satellites...working together in a constellation.
...
Europe and America have clashed because America wants what amounts to a veto over Galileo in times of military need, in other words, to be able to knock out the entire Galileo system. The problem is that one of the main signals Galileo will use for its public service is the same as one the US military has also set its sights on. America claims this risks interference problems. The Pentagon also wants to be able to switch off any civil system at any time. But if it blocked the Galileo frequency, it would also be blocking its own military signal, obviously a disaster.

The US has enjoyed controlling GPS technology and apparently the military is reluctant to give that up, even when it's our allies providing the competition. Now Russia and China are signing on to this project as well, which only increases the concern. Recall that our posture is to prevent anybody from threatening our superiority of arms and technology, so this looks to be yet another area where a rift could develop that further cements the "US vs. Everybody Else" dichotomy.

A fundamental question to address at this point was raised by Niall Ferguson in the Summer 2003 issue of Hoover Digest with his article What Is Power?:

[P]ower is not just military power; or rather, military power depends on economic growth and political institutions.

Another line of argument is that power is diplomatic, not military: Precisely the threat posed to smaller countries by the power of the United States is encouraging them to combine against America.

This is an argument that has a special appeal to Europeans. They know that the EU is a military pygmy...However, by acting collectively and through the institutions of the postwar international order—the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NATO—the Europeans may be able to restrain the United States. Samuel Huntington once argued that European integration was "the single most important move" as the rest of the world responded to American hyperpower and that it would ultimately lead to a "truly multipolar" twenty-first century. The fact that the United States spent weeks vainly trying to persuade France and Germany to back military action against Iraq suggests that there is at least some truth in this view.

We might still have great military/technological power at the moment, but with our forces stretched so thin even this is debatable. What’s more, there are other forms of power and to a large extent the Bush administration has weakend the US in that respect.

By valuing and exercising our military might over all else, we have lost standing and leverage in the world. In light of our quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, where even bringing our great military power to bear has not produced the expected raging success, I submit that we have projected power from a position of weakness only to our detriment.

I especially like Ferguson's conclusion:

Power...is partly about material things: guns, butter, men, money, oil. But it is also about morale. In a world characterized by the diffusion of most of the material elements of power, real power may therefore come to depend on having credibility and legitimacy. Faith cannot move mountains. But it can move men.

If we stay true to our ideals, we can be incredibly strong. Unfortunately, Bush has undermined our founding principles at home and abroad, and we are no longer a real beacon of freedom or a constructive force for change in the world. That will have a greater negative impact on our security than Europe getting their own GPS (or China putting a man into space).

Military and technological supremacy is fleeting. Our real strength, as Kucinich observed, must come from our ability to work with other global powers in positive ways. That means not bullying other countries and claiming a monopoly on the ideals of liberty or truth.

In his autobiography, aptly subtitled "The Story of My Experiments with Truth", Gandhi wrote:

The principle called Satyagraha came into being before that name was invented. Indeed when it was born, I myself could not say what it was. In Gujarati also we used the English phrase 'passive resistance' to describe it. When in a meeting of Europeans I found that the term 'passive resistance' was too narrowly construed, that it was supposed to be a weapon of the weak, that it could be characterized by hatred, and that it could finally manifest itself as violence, I had to damur to all these statements and explain the real nature of the Indian movement. It was clear that a new word must be coined by the Indians to designate their struggle.

But I could not for the life of me find out a new name, and therefore offered a nominal prize through Indian Opinion to the reader who made the best suggestion on the subject. As a result Maganlal Gandhi coined the word 'Sadagraha' (Sat=truth, Agraha=firmness) and won the prize. But in order to make it clearer I changed the word to 'Satyagraha' which has since become current in Gujarati as a designation for the struggle. ²

Most people focus on the non-violent aspect of Gandhi's methods. What's often missed is that it explicitly admits that nobody, not even the practitioners of non-violence, knows the only truth. Thus, the "sat" aspect reflects that our actions must be part of a process to discover the truth that involves all parties to a conflict. Put simply:

# Each person's opinions and beliefs represent part of the truth.

# In order to see more of the truth we must share our truths cooperatively.

# This implies a desire to communicate and a determination to do so, which in turn requires developing and refining relevant skills of communication.

# Commitment to seeing as much of the truth as possible means that we can not afford to categorize ourselves or others.

Of course, being really nice doesn't affect change by itself. That's why I too reject terms like "pacifist" and "passive resistance". Satyagraha is not a weapon of the weak, and requires active engagement.

Non-violence is not about just sitting around hoping good things will happen. It is not just marching with "No Blood For Oil" signs. It is not appeasement. It is about approaching conflict in a different, more truthful way.

If we stop acting as though we are the sole owners of the truth, we will have greater opportunity to work constructively with other countries. Further, if we toss away our White Man's Burden attitude, quit fomenting coups and supporting the resulting dictators, we can avoid inevitable unintended consquences and our erstwhile puppets turning around and biting us.

We sponsored the 1953 coup in Iran. Our support of the brutal reign of the Shah ultimately led to the violent Islamic revolution in 1979. And now of course we have a budding nuclear power on our hands as the lesson the Iranians have learned from our aggressive war against Iraq is that countries without nuclear weapons get invaded.

I might add that we sponsored the Iraqi coup in 1963 that brought the Ba'ath party to power in the first place. And we armed Iraq with chemical weapons during its war with Iran in the 1980s.

Only when our pal Saddam Hussein threatened our non-democratic oil suppliers did we spank him. Our tinkering in the affairs of other nations and our violent responses to our recalcitrant allies of convenience has done nothing to secure America’s borders or bring stability to hotspots such as the Middle East.

Making non-violence our organizing principle can take many forms. For example, we could put our immense national resources to work to address global issues such as AIDS and hunger. Closer to home, we could start with a Civilian Based Defense system as Lithuania did when breaking away from the Soviet Union. We could even apply non-violent strategies against terrorism.

The bottom-line is we could work wonders if we put as much time, energy and money into alternative approaches to conflict as we spend on our preparations for war. In fact, it would likely cost far less in the long run.

Notes:

1. Via PRC News via The Modulator.

2. The linked website mistakenly had replaced "Sadagraha" with another instance of "Satyagraha" which not only makes no sense in the context, but according to my copy of the autobiography it is also wrong! I have corrected that in the quoted text.