At this late date, it is hard to take anything Mr. Trump says or does seriously. He seems not only out of touch with reality but also unable to make that reality conform to his narcissistic wishes. It has taken him a lifetime of defiant egoism to arrive at a condition which is universal to the human experience and especially to human learning: helplessness. War in the Middle East ties him in knots, drives up the price of gasoline, and brings him closer to midterm defeat in Congress with its almost certain legal reckoning of his graft and deceit.
Helplessness is woven into human reality. We begin life as helpless infants, and we end life helpless to escape our death. Helplessness humbles. Helplessness teaches us about our radical interdependence, about the relevance and practicality of the Golden Rule in its various versions.
Stephen Miller articulates Mr. Trump’s (and Hegseth’s and Putin’s and Netanyahu’s—almost everything argued here applies to them also) worldview in a few simple words:
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
But Mr. Miller leaves out the reality that helplessness is an equally pervasive law and fundamental condition, leaving us no choice but to make compacts with each other by which we agree to transform Miller’s Law of Force in return for agreements—the Force of Law— that allow us to live in relative peace with each other and create a culture where helplessly dependent children are allowed to gradually grow into adults possessing what might be called “mature interdependence,” a sense that includes a humble awareness that I may be doing well at the moment but it is almost inevitable that I will need to call on you for help sometime.
Our sense of universal interrelationship has received a new impetus in the form of the global climate emergency that the President completely denies. We all breathe the same single atmosphere. The gasoline car you or I drive degrades the whole system; the individual and collective efforts we are making to increase the use of clean energy strengthen the entire threatened biosystem that supports us.
And in 1945 a further dimension of helplessness entered our consciousness in the form of the invention of a weapon so powerful that it rendered everyone on Earth vulnerable to its effects. Mr. Trump has given a number of different rationales for his pursuit of “victory” over Iran, but the goal he repeats the most is the goal that he is most helpless to achieve: that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
This is patently absurd, on a number of levels.
First, it assumes a double standard. Our nuclear weapons are OK because we will never use them for evil purposes, while theirs are evil because they are evil. They in the case of Iran includes 90 million people, most of whom are roundly contemptuous of the corrupt militarists that govern them by violence, torture and incarceration.
Second, the Miller paradigm of force against force only incentivizes more nations to join the nuclear elite.
Third, much emphasis has been placed upon destroying Iran’s centrifuges and other equipment needed to fashion nuclear weapons as if they could never be rebuilt—or Iran could not buy nuclear weapons from some other nation.
The present paradigm of war, ever developing toward both more nations possessing nuclear weapons and also toward autonomous drones and other new ways to kill each other’s children, contains no way out. With the right materials and equipment, any nation or even, God forbid, any non-state entity, can build a nuclear weapon. They are with us forever. We must break the equation that asserts that more nuclear weapons equal more security, and the nuclear nations must take the lead.
Modern war demonstrates that we, including the U.S., the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Netanyahu, Hezbollah, Putin, the Houthis, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and on and on, cannot kill our way to peace.
The purpose of identifying as communists or socialists or capitalists or Russians or Jews or Muslims or Christians, all the categories by which we separate ourselves in order to deny our Oneness, is to strengthen our certainty that we are on the side of right. The helplessness that would come with climate catastrophe or nuclear war would reduce these categories to irrelevance.
Are the twin realities of nuclear weapons and climate a powerful enough dose of reality to transcend the present gigantic dynamism of our suffering Earth: the endless competition, the arms trade, the “shareholder value” which more and more divides the haves and have nots, the alienation and misunderstanding within nations and between them, the denial of common sense—all in the context of floods and fires and typhoons and ecosystem collapses? So far, not yet. But the level of cooperation required for survival implies a new vision that transcends the forces of greed and short-term self-interest that presently motivate us.
Realizing such a vision might begin with an admission of helplessness around both the direction of the arms race and our radical climate interdependence. Looking down the time-stream, really seeing that we share one future, either dying together or learning to live together, is an essential thought-operation that can start us toward hopeful action.
