We need better leaders than we have, but history teaches us that good ideas have a way of finding the men and women to implement them
Ambassador Freeman chairs Projects International, Inc. He is a retired U.S. defense official, diplomat, and interpreter
Cross-posted from Chas Freeman’s website Wikipedia: USCapitol – Landing of Columbus We are witnessing the end of multiple epochs. The world of our parents and our childhood is no more. Never has the dire description of current events attributed to Antonio Gramsci seemed more apt. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” [1] Sadly, my country, the United States of America has become such a monster, foolishly dismembering the world order it originally sponsored.
Five centuries ago, the birth of the Spanish and Portuguese empires ushered in an age of European global supremacy. In 1609, the great Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, wrote Mare Liberum – “The Free Sea” – arguing persuasively that there could be no sovereignty over the maritime domain or constraint of free passage through it. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia enshrined the notion of the sovereign equality of states and their right to practice their own moral ideologies free of interference from others. Euro-American imperialism then imposed the Westphalian principles upon the world. Ironically, they proved incompatible with great power colonialism and inspired its demise. They live on in the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” [2] But they are now under attack.
In 1763, Britain decisively defeated French naval power. Britannia then ruled the waves. That maritime hegemony passed to the United States at the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in 1943. The 263-year-long Anglo-American domination of the world’s oceans enabled colonialism but imposed rules against piracy, the slave trade, the closure of straits and other international waterways, and other obstructions to freedom of navigation. These rules – eventually embodied in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – are now routinely violated.
Once the champion of freedom of navigation, free trade, and the sovereign equality of nations plying the seas, the United States Navy now attacks merchant vessels, seizes their cargoes, and resells them. It lawlessly murders civilians in small craft whenever it is told to do so. Littoral states blockade straits and are in turn blockaded without regard to the impact on the global economy or other nations’ wellbeing. America routinely seeks the overthrow of foreign governments by immiserating their people. Yesterday, Syria and Venezuela. Today, Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon. Tomorrow, Cuba, we are credibly told.
The 21 st century has seen the slow annihilation of international law. Prohibitions on wars of aggression, genocide, collective punishment, assassination, torture, the ill treatment of prisoners, and the acquisition of territory by force are no longer observed or enforced. The world is reacting to this by rearming and preparing for war. Leaders who fear assassination or the wrath of their people build bunkers and hide in them. Some equate leadership with partisan division and pandering to xenophobia.
Israel and America have led the way by setting aside a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” [3] in favor of a vile celebration of savagery. ‘Ceasefires with Israeli characteristics’ – hypocritical truces that perpetuate war at lower levels of intensity – have everywhere replaced diplomatic efforts to craft a meeting of the minds that can underpin a peace. Israel relentlessly pursues land, not peace. The United States sets its sights on luxury real estate development of the genocide-laden graveyard of Gaza.
The United States is not alone in adopting ruthless expediency as the basis for its foreign policy. The rest of the West has replicated American errors of commission and omission. International law no longer inhibits aggression or promotes human decency. Might makes right. In 416 BCE, Athens famously set aside its respect for democracy to argue that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Its pursuit of lawless hegemony then led to its downfall.
As the West sets aside its constraints on executive power, minority rights, pluralism, and institutional checks on arbitrary and capricious behavior by strongmen, it is well to remind ourselves that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [4] Indifference to injustice and iniquity is no better than complicity in it. In 1919, William Butler Yeats forecast this when he wrote that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” [5] In 1925, another poet, T. S. Eliot predicted that the world would “end not with a bang but with a whimper.” [6] As the world order we knew dies, there are many whimpers. So far, no bang. But we are working our way toward one. The United States has abrogated every one of its arms control agreements, greatly increasing the potential for war to escalate into a nuclear exchange. The Russian Federation is under pressure to respond with nuclear weapons to the NATO and EU proxy war in Ukraine. China is building a massive nuclear arsenal to counter possible American intervention in its civil war with the authorities in Taiwan.
I cite poetry because it makes the irrational intelligible without killing its strangeness. The world is suffering a nervous breakdown, led by apparent sociopaths and depressed by a feeling of hopelessness. What is the cure and where is it to come from?
We are beginning to see possible answers to this in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic prophetic tradition. Ideas can become actions that improve the world. Those who speak truth to power are vindicated when their considered judgments gain traction and move societies toward justice.
Brave women like Francesca Albanese defy the contemporary ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ code of public indifference to the dehumanization of other human beings. Brave politicians like Pedro Sánchez of Spain break ranks with their pusillanimous European colleagues to lead their nation in refusing cooperation with evil. In the emerging polycentric world order, small and middle-ranking powers gather moral weight.
The world’s peoples want honest governments whose policies follow the golden rule, not regimes that contradict it by practicing exploitation, cruelty, or moral indifference. In many countries, privileged elites that have estranged themselves from ordinary citizens are under mounting criticism and pressure to reform. Brave gatherings like this one call for a return to the rule of reason, a renewed focus on peace and economic development, the curbing of the excesses of financial capitalism, and the recovery of the belief that human society can be improved by rational inquiry and institutional reform. All this lends hope where it has been absent. Changes for the better are coming.
We need better leaders than we have, but history teaches us that good ideas have a way of finding the men and women to implement them. This forum is a place to develop ideas that can make the world safer and better and to debate how to do this. It is an honor to have been asked to participate in it. [1] “Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri.” [2] The Five Principles are mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence [3] The justification for the publication of the U.S. declaration of independence. [4] George Santayana, 1905. [5] William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919. [6] T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” 1925.
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