On December20, 2019, US President Donald Trump signed the National Defense AuthorizationAct, creating the newest military service since the US Air Force wasestablished in 1947. Although the United States Space Force is intended tobolster this countrys overall power in an expanding geostrategic competitionwith Russia the usual or orthodox sort of national response amidst our structuralglobal anarchy its plausible effects will likely be destabilizing. At itscore, the critical US policy error committed here is both conceptual andhistoric; that is, it consists of failing to recognize that literally millenniaof Realpolitik-generated competitionshave ended in more-or-less catastrophic forms of war. In essence, therefore, bycreating Space Force, Donald Trump will merely have passed Americas most basicmilitary posture from one untenable position to another. Apropos of this flawed transmittal, thisarticle by Professor Louis Rene Beres will further clarify certain assorteddetails and informed expectations.
What is the good ofpassing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification alwayson the same plane?-Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Significantly,US President Donald Trumps newly announced Space Force represents an ironicreaffirmation of past policy failures. More precisely, when understood as a wittingextrapolation from core Trump policies of America First, the operational roleof this newest US armed service will be to extend Realpolitik[1] or power politics vertically, intospace. Prima facie, at best, the predictableresult will be the same as it has always been here on earth. At worst, this result could be utterly banefuland uniquely catastrophic.
Space Forcewill be founded upon certain conspicuous failures of the past. It will projectentire centuries of intellectually vacant policy expectations into still anotherdimension. Accordingly, Americans should now be inquiring: What conceivable goodcan be expected from such a persistently injurious military posture?
The answeris plain. Instead of America First or any of its prematurely celebrated derivatives,a rational and well-intentioned American president should reject all zero-sumderivatives or corollaries of classical belligerent nationalism. Any Americanpolicy that intentionally seeks to maximize its own national well-being at theexpense of others will be acting against certain peremptory norms ofinternational law[2] and against its own dominant securityinterests. By definition, any such policy especially in the midst of ColdWar II [3] could prove incoherent, indefensibleor even altogether irrational.
Nothingcould be more apparent to anyone who bothers to take the trouble to thinklogically and historically about such serious matters.[4] In candor, the requisite analysesare by no means dense or esoteric. Indeed, on such long-documented matters ofpolicy, history is unambiguous.
To clarifyfurther, the world is a system. Always, everything is interrelated. Interalia, no American foreign policy success can ever be achieved at the sacrificialexpense of other countries and peoples. And absolutely no such presumptivesuccess is sustainable if the rest of the planet must thereby expect a consistentlymore violent and explosive future.[5]
Here, on earth, the basic story is always thesame; it is always about certain inane and self-destructive inter-statecompetitions.
Here, onthis irremediably interdependent planet, the national tribe, in one belligerent manifestation or another, has long underminedall needed opportunities for creating a durable and authentic world order.
Still, itis exactly this latest expression of corrosive national tribalism that is championedby Mr. Trumps Space Force. When all cumulative policy impacts are taken into carefulaccount, this soulless[6] derivative of America Firstwill inevitably emerge as anything but patriotic. What else should we reasonably conclude about a planned militaryposture that injures this country and various others abjectly, and at the sametime?[7]
Thoughcounter-intuitive, Space Force represents a US security posture that is badly misconceivedand prospectively lethal. Left unchallenged, it will further exacerbate thedeliberate Presidential choice of endless belligerence as a favored medium of Americanmilitary well-being. What is required, instead, is the readily decipherable opposite of Space Force. What is needed,immediately, is a markedly broadened US awareness of human and societal interconnectedness.
Always, history is instructive. From the 1648 Peaceof Westphalia to the present fragmenting moment, world politics has been shapedby a continuously shifting balance of power and by variously relentless correlatesof war, terror and genocide.[8] Ideally, of course, hope shouldcontinue to exist. To be sure, there is no rational alternative. But now itshould sing much more softly, unobtrusively, in an aptly prudent undertone.
For Americans increasingly endangered byseat-of-the-pants Trump foreign policies, however, more will be required than sotto voce modulations. Merely tosurvive on this imperiled planet, all of us, together, will have to rediscoveran individual human life, one consciouslydetached from ritualistic patterns of conformance, mindless entertainments, shallowoptimism, or any other disingenuously contrived expressions of someretrospectively imagined tribal happiness. At a minimum, such survival willdemand a prompt and full-scale retreat from what Donald Trump has termedAmerica First and from all of its rapidly dissembling correlates. In thisregard, Trumps Space Force is the foreseeable result of a much deeper societalpathology, a know-nothing American populism that drives out intellect andreason in favor of deliberate mystifications and a collective self-delusion.
Jefferson and Americas other Founding Fathershad already understood: There is always a necessary and respectable place forserious erudition. Learning fromhistory, Americans may yet learn something from America First that is useful toopposing any actual iterations of a planned Space Force. They may learn, evenduring this national declension Time ofTrump, that a ubiquitous mortality is far more consequential than anyglittering administration promises of supremacy, advantage or victory.[9]
In The Decline of the West, first publishedduring World War I, Oswald Spengler asked: Can a desperate faith inknowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions? Assuredly, thisremains a vital query, but one that will never be adequately raised in our universities,on Wall Street or anywhere in the Trump White House. Still, we may learnsomething productive about these indispensable grand questions by moreclosely studying American roles and responsibilities in a changing worldpolitics.
At thatpoint we might finally come to understand that the most suffocatinginsecurities of life on earth can never be undone by further militarizing spaceand abrogating pertinent international treaties.
In the end,even in American foreign policy decision-making, truth is exculpatory. In whatamounts to a uniquely promising paradox, Space Force can help illuminate a blatantlie that may still help us see the underlying truth. This peremptory truth is notreally mysterious or unfathomable. Americans require, after all, a substantiallywider consciousness of unity and relatedness between individual human beingsand (correspondingly) between adversarial nation-states.
There is nomore urgent requirement.
None.
Thoughseemingly oriented toward greater American power and security, building anAmerican Space Force would merely propel this countrys military strategy fromone untenable posture of belligerent nationalism to another. What theproponents of Space Force ignore, interalia, is that all national security options should be examined from thestandpoint of their cumulative impact.Accordingly, if the credible effect of this new America First policy initiativewill be to spawn various reciprocal postures of belligerent nationalism among principalfoes (e.g., Russia and potentially China) the net effect will prove sorely andcomprehensively negative.[10]
Far betterfor President Trump to consider the relevant insight of Pierre Teilhard deChardin offered in his masterwork, ThePhenomenon of Man: No element can move and grow except with and by all theothers with itself. While not conceived with any particular reference to globalchaos[11] or national military strategies,this elucidating fragment of the French Jesuit philosophers wisdom applieshere with substantial purpose and an altogether exquisite perfection. Summingup, Space Force, in all its apparent detachment from historical experience, representsa move in the wrong direction, a determinative step forward into anotherdimension of prospective international conflict, but a consequentiallyretrograde step nonetheless.
[1] See, by this author, Louis Ren Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policyand World Order, Lexington Books, 1984; and Louis RenBeres, Mimicking Sisyphus: AmericasCountervailing Nuclear Strategy, Lexington Books, 1983. Regardingphilosophical foundations of Realpoliitk:Right is the interest of thestronger, says Thrasymachus in Bk. I, Sec. 338 of Plato, THE REPUBLIC (B.Jowett tr., 1875). Justice is acontract neither to do nor to suffer wrong, says Glaucon, id., Bk. II, Sec. 359. See also, Philus in Bk III, Sec. 5 of Cicero,DE REPUBLICA.
[2] Accordingto Article 53 of the Vienna Convention onthe Law of Treaties: a peremptory norm of general international law is anorm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as awhole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modifiedonly by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.See: Vienna Convention on the Law ofTreaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980.U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679(1969).
[3] In expresslypolitical science terms, positing the influence of Cold War II meansexpecting that the world system is becoming increasingly bipolar. Forearly writings, by this author, on the global security implications of justsuch an expanding bipolarity, see: Louis Ren Beres, Bipolarity, Multipolarity,and the Reliability of Alliance Commitments, Western Political Quarterly,Vol. 25, No.4., December 1972, pp. 702-710; Louis Ren Beres, Bipolarity,Multipolarity, and the Tragedy of the Commons, Western Political Quarterly,Vol. 26, No.4., December 1973, pp, 649-658; and Louis Ren Beres, Guerillas,Terrorists, and Polarity: New Structural Models of World Politics, WesternPolitical Quarterly, Vol. 27, No.4., December 1974, pp. 624-636.
[4] Butone should be reminded here of Bertrand Russells trenchant observation in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916):Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth more thanruin, more even than death.
[5] To the extent that anysuch American foreign policy violates international law, it would alsorepresent a corollary violation of US law. In the sober words of Mr. JusticeGray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law,and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice ofappropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726F. 2d 774 (1984)).The specificincorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is most expressly codified atArt. 6 of the US Constitution, theso-called Supremacy Clause.
[6] Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought ofsoul (in German, Seele)as the intangible essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung everprovided any precise definition of the term, but it was not intended by eitherin some ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable andcritical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in thepresent context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of Americaby various express references to soul. Freud was plainly disgustedby any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of trueconsciousness (e.g., awareness of intellect, literature and history),and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallowoptimism and material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweepingpsychological misery.
[7] From the standpointof classical political and legal philosophy, such a national policy would bethe diametric opposite of the statement by Emmerich de Vattel in The Law of Nations (1758): The firstgeneral law which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations isthat each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancementof other Nations.
[8] International law remains avigilante system, or Westphalian. This latter referenceis to the Peace of Westphalia (1648),which concluded the Thirty Years War, and created the now still-existingdecentralized, or self-help, state system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648,1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[9] Seeby this author, at Oxford University Press:https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/war-political-victories/
[10] Included in thisassessment must be the expanding risks of US Presidential nucleardecision-making. By this writer, see Louis Ren Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistshttps://thebulletin.onuclearrg/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/
[11] Although composed inthe seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes Leviathan still offers anilluminating vision of chaos in world politics. Says the English philosopher inChapter XIII, Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning theirFelicity, and Misery: During chaos, a condition which Hobbes identifiesas a time of War, it is a time where every man is Enemy toevery man and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, andshort. At the time of writing, Hobbes believed that the condition ofnature in world politics was less chaotic than that same conditionexisting among individual human beings -because of what he called thedreadful equality of individual men in nature being able to killothers but this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappearedwith the spread of nuclear weapons.
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