http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-north-korea-kim-jong-un-nuclear-holocaust-rhetoric-foreign-policy-contradiction-a7892031.html
The looming military conflict
between the US and North Korea contains a double danger. Although both
countries are for sure bluffing, and not anticipating an actual nuclear
exchange, rhetoric never functions as mere rhetoric but can always run out of
control. Furthermore, as many commentators have noticed, the weird thing is
that Trump decided to occupy a position symmetrical to Kim Jong-un, raising the
stakes in the game.
This escalation more and more
resembles the struggle for recognition between the two subjects described by
Hegel, the struggle in which the winner is the one who proves his readiness to
die rather than make a compromise on behalf of life. Trump thereby
inadvertently got caught into a game which does not become a true superpower –
something that can be understood as a strategy of North Korea, a small and weak
country, is simply ridiculous in the case of the US where a discreet stern
warning would be enough.
We should apply to today’s
situation what we know today about the Cuban missile crisis. The view of this
crisis by the US military establishment was best rendered by Raymond Garthoff,
at the time an intelligence analyst in the State Department: “If we have
learned anything from this experience, it is that weakness, even only apparent
weakness, invites Soviet transgression. At the same time, firmness in the last
analysis will force the Soviets to back away from rash initiatives.”
The Soviet perception of the
crisis was different: for them, it was not the threat of force that ended the
crisis. The Soviet leadership believed the crisis ended because both Soviet and
US officials realised they were at the brink and that the crisis was
threatening to destroy humankind.
They did not fear only for
their immediate safety and were not worried merely about losing a battle in
Cuba. Their fear was the fear of deciding the fate of millions of others, even
of civilisation itself. It was this fear, experienced by both sides at the peak
of the crisis, which enabled them to reach a peaceful solution; and it was this
fear which was at the very core of the famous exchange of letters between
Khrushchev and Fidel Castro at the climax of the crisis.
In a letter to Khrushchev from
26 October 1962, Castro wrote that “if the imperialists invade Cuba with the
goal of occupying it, the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity
is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances
in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it. I
tell you this because I believe that the imperialists' aggressiveness is
extremely dangerous and if they actually carry out the brutal act of invading
Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment
to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear legitimate defence,
however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.”
Khrushchev answered Castro on
30 October: “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to
launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course,
realise where that would have led. Rather than a simple strike, it would have
been the start of a thermonuclear world war.
“Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I
consider this proposal of yours incorrect, although I understand your
motivation.
“We have lived through the
most serious moment when a nuclear world war could have broken out. Obviously,
in that case, the United States would have sustained huge losses, but the
Soviet Union and the whole socialist camp would have also suffered greatly. As
far as Cuba is concerned, it would be difficult to say even in general terms
what this would have meant for them.
“In the first place, Cuba
would have been burned in the fire of war. There's no doubt that the Cuban
people would have fought courageously or that they would have died heroically.
But we are not struggling against imperialism in order to die, but to take
advantage of all our possibilities, to lose less in the struggle and win
more to overcome and achieve the victory of communism.”
The essence of Khrushchev’s
argument can be best summoned by Neil Kinnock’s anti-war argument, when he was
Labour’s prime ministerial candidate in the 1980s: “I am ready to die for my
country, but I am not ready to let my country die for me.”
It is significant to note
that, in spite of the “totalitarian” character of the Soviet regime, this fear
was much more predominant in the Soviet leadership than in the US leadership –
so, perhaps, the time has come to rehabilitate Khrushchev, not Kennedy, as the
real hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In the emerging new world
order, there seems to be less and less space for such thinking – why? This
emerging order is no longer the order of global liberal democracy imagined by
political scientist Francis Fukuyama but an order of the fragile co-existence
of different politico-theological ways of life – co-existence, of course,
against the background of the smooth functioning of global capitalism.
The obscenity of this process
is that it can present itself as a progress in anti-colonial struggle: the
liberal West will no longer be allowed to impose standards on others, all ways
of life will be treated as equal... no wonder Robert Mugabe displayed sympathy
for Trump's slogan “America first”.
“America first” for you,
“Zimbabwe first” for me, “India first” or “North Korea first!” for them. This
is how the British Empire, the first global capitalist empire, functioned: each
ethnic and religious community was allowed to pursue its own way of life –
Hindus in India were safely burning widows and so on – and these local
“customs” were either criticised as barbaric or praised for their premodern
wisdom, but tolerated since what mattered is that they were economically part
of the Empire.
If the basic underlying axiom
of the Cold War was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), the axiom of today's
War on Terror seems to be the opposite one, that of NUTS (Nuclear Utilisation
Target Selection) – in other words, the idea that, by means of a surgical
strike, one can destroy the enemy's nuclear capacities while the anti-missile
shield is protecting us from a counterstrike.
More precisely, the US adopts
a differential strategy: it acts as if it continues to trust the MAD logic in
its relations with Russia and China, while it is tempted to practise NUTS with
Iran and North Korea.
The paradoxical mechanism of
MAD inverts the logic of the “self-realising prophecy” into a “self-stultifying
intention”: the very fact that each side can be sure that, in the case it
decides to launch a nuclear attack on the other side, the other side will
respond with full destructive force, guarantees that no side will start a
war.
The logic of NUTS is, on the
contrary, that the enemy can be forced to disarm if it is assured that we can
strike at him without risking a counterattack. The very fact that two directly
contradictory strategies are mobilised simultaneously by the same superpower
bears witness to the illogical nature of this reasoning.
In December 2016, this inconsistency
reached an almost unimaginably ridiculous peak: both Trump and Putin emphasised
the opportunity for new, more friendly relations between Russia and the US, and
simultaneously asserted their full commitment to the arms race – as if peace
among the superpowers can only be provided by a new Cold War.
A similar perverted strategy
of profiting from the very threat to one’s survival (and from the worst outcome
of one’s own reign) is at work in a new type of state socialism which is
emerging in North Korea (and up to a point also in Cuba and Venezuela): it
combines ruthless party rule with the wildest capitalism.
While state power is firmly
entrenched in the ruling party, the state is no longer able to provide daily
life necessities, especially food, to the general population, so it has to
tolerate wild local capitalism: in North Korea, there are hundreds of “free”
markets where individuals sell home-grown food, commodities smuggled from
China, and so on. The North Korean state is thus relieved of the burden to take
care for ordinary people and can concentrate on new arms and the lives of the
elite – in an unheard-of cruel irony, the North Korean basic ideological notion
of juche (self-reliance) arrives at its truth: not the nation, but individuals
themselves have to rely on their own forces.
This predominant trend is
extremely dangerous because it runs directly against the urgent need to
establish a new mode of relating to our environs, a radical political and
economic change called by Peter Sloterdijk “the domestication of the wild
animal culture”.
Until now, each culture
disciplined and educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them
in the guise of state power, but the relationship between different cultures
and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state
of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice.
As Hegel conceptualised it,
the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism – the
readiness to sacrifice one’s life for one’s nation-state – which means that the
wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical
life within a state.
Is today’s North Korea, with
its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets, not the ultimate example
of this logic of unconditional nation-state sovereignty?
However, the moment we fully
accept the fact that we live on a Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently
imposes itself is that of civilising civilisations themselves, of imposing
universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, a task
rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and
ethnic “heroic” violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the world) for
one’s specific cause.
Back in the 1960s, the motto
of the early ecological movement was “Think globally, act locally!” With his
politics of sovereignty echoing the stance of North Korea, Trump promises to do
the exact opposite: “Think locally, act globally".
