Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Foreign Affairs

  • Why Waltz is Wrong

    David KriegerThe lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.”  The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb.  He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have.  There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states.  Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.”


    In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms.  But the history is short and there have been many close calls.  During the 67-year period since the dawn of the Nuclear Age there have been numerous accidents, miscalculations and threats to use nuclear weapons.  Fifty years ago, the US and Soviet Union stood at the precipice of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Waltz’s faith in nuclear deterrence reflects a belief in rationality, a belief that all leaders will behave rationally at all times, including under conditions of extreme stress.  This defies our understanding of human behavior and the ever-present potential for human fallibility. 


    Another way to view the historical data from which Waltz finds comfort is by an analogy of a man jumping off a hundred-story building.  As he passes floor after floor, he wonders why people on the ground are showing concern for his well-being.  He ignores the approaching ground and focuses his attention on the fact that nothing bad has happened to him yet.  In Waltz’s theory of nuclear deterrence, there is no hard ground below, nor gravity acting upon the jumper.  He argues that “history has shown that where nuclear capabilities emerge, so, too, does stability.  When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more may be better.”  While having more may be better, it may also be far worse. 


    Martin Hellman, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in risk analysis, argues that a child born today has a ten percent or greater chance of having his or her life cut short by nuclear war.  Unlike Waltz’s analysis, risk analysis takes into account the odds of an event occurring and doesn’t base its analysis of the future simply on what the historical record shows at a given point in time.  Ten coin flips may produce ten straight “heads,” but it would be unwise to assume that the results between heads and tails would not even out over time.  With nuclear weapons, the consequences of being wrong in one’s projections are, of course, far more dire than with coin tosses.


    Another analogy that has been used to describe the standoff between nuclear-armed powers, particularly the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, was of two men standing up to their waists in the same pool of gasoline and each man being ready to strike an unlit match.  If either man struck the match, both men would be consumed by the fire that would result.  With nuclear weapons, the conflagration would not stop at the two men – it would include their families, their communities, their countries and the world. 


    Waltz makes the bet that no leader of a nuclear weapon state will ever strike the match or allow the match to fall into hands that will strike it.  It is a foolish bet to make.  The two men, and the rest of us, would be far safer if the gasoline were drained from the pool.  In the same way, the world would be much safer if nuclear weapons were abolished, rather than shared in the hope they would enhance security in the Middle East or elsewhere.


    Waltz may believe that it is precisely the threat of conflagration that keeps the men from striking the matches.  For many, even most, men he may be correct, but the fact is that neither Waltz nor anyone else can predict human behavior under all conditions.  There may be some leaders in some circumstances for whom striking the match would seem rational.  In addition, even if neither man were to strike a match, lightning may strike the pool of gasoline or other sparks may ignite the pool from unforeseen causes.  Instances of accidents, madness and human fallibility abound.


    Nuclear weapons have brought humankind to the precipice.  These weapons threaten cities, countries, civilization and complex life on the planet.  It is the responsibility of those of us alive on the planet now to abolish these weapons of mass annihilation, not justify their spread, as Waltz would have us do.

  • Kenneth Waltz is not Crazy, but he is Dangerous: Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East

    Richard FalkIt seems surprising that the ultra-establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, would go to the extreme of publishing a lead article by the noted political scientist, Kenneth Waltz, with the title “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” in its current issue. It is more the reasoning of the article than the eye-catching title that flies in the face of the anti-proliferation ethos that has been the consensus lynchpin of nuclear weapons states, and especially the United States. At the same time, Waltz takes pain to avoid disavowing his mainstream political identity. He echoes without pausing to reflect upon the evidence undergirding the rather wobbly escalating assumption that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons at this time. Waltz does acknowledge that Iran might be only trying to have a ‘breakout’ capability of the sort long possessed by Japan and several other countries, that is, the technological capacity if facing a national emergency to assemble a few bombs in a matter of months. Nowhere does Waltz allude to the recently publicized agreement among the 14 American intelligence agencies that there is no evidence that Iran has decided to resume its military program that had been reportedly abandoned in 2003. In other ways, as well, Waltz signals his general support for the American approach to Israeli security other than in relation to nuclear weapons, and so, it should be clear, Waltz is not a political dissenter, a policy radical, nor even a critic of Israel’s role in the region.


    Waltz’s Three Options


    Waltz insists that aside from the breakout option, there are two other plausible scenarios worth considering: sanctions and coercive diplomacy to induce Iran “to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” which he deems unlikely to overcome a genuine appetite for the bomb, or Iran defies the pressures and acquires nuclear weapons, which he regards as the most desirable of the three options. It seems reasonable to wonder ‘why.’ In essence, Waltz is arguing that experience and logic demonstrate that the relations among states become more stable, less war-prone, when a balance is maintained, and that there is no reason to think that if Iran acquired nuclear weapons it would not behave in accordance with the deterrence regime that has discouraged all uses of nuclear weapons ever since 1945, and especially during the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this regard, Waltz is expressing what I regard to be a wildly exaggerated faith in the rationality and prudence of leaders who make decisions on matters of war and peace.


    He does make a contextual argument that I mostly agree with, namely, that Israel alone possessing a regional nuclear monopoly is more dangerous and undesirable than Iran becoming a second nuclear weapons state in the region. In effect, a regional nuclear monopolist is worse than a regional system of balance that incorporates deterrence logic. For Israel to be deterred would contribute to peace and security in the region, and this seems likely to reduce somewhat, although at a level of risk far short of zero, the prospect of any use of nuclear weapons and other forms of aggression in the Middle East. But to say that A (Iran gets the bomb) is better than B (breakout capability but no bomb) and C (sanctions and coercive diplomacy induce Iran to forego bomb) is to forget about D, which is far better than A, B, and C in relation to sustainable stability, but also because it represents an implicit acknowledgement that the very idea of basing security upon the threat to annihilate hundreds of thousand, if not more, innocent persons is a moral abomination that has already implicated the nuclear weapons states in a security policy, which if ever tested by threat and use, would be genocidal, if not omnicidal, and certainly criminal. This anti-nuclear posture was substantially endorsed by a majority of judges in a groundbreaking Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on 8 July 1996, although these strong findings as to international law were, not surprisingly, cast aside and ignored by the nuclear weapons states, most defiantly by the United States.


    The Case for Option D


    What then is Option D? Option D would involve the negotiation and implementation of a nuclear weapons free zone throughout the Middle East (MENFZ), reinforced by non-aggression commitments, normalization of economic and political relations, and ideally accompanied by genuine progress toward a just and sustainable Palestine/Israel peace accord. Significantly, Waltz does not even pause to consider it as in all likelihood he regards such an approach as completely inconsistent with the hard power realities of global diplomacy, making it foolish and irrelevant to take the possibility of a MENFZ seriously. Needless to say, D is also not in the Netanyahu playbook, and quite likely no future Israeli leader will be prepared to give up the nuclear weapons arsenal that Israel has been consistently acquiring and developing over the last four decades. And it seems fair to conjecture that anyone who proposes a MENFZ would be at odds with the realist camp in international relations, and such a piece would almost certainly be rejected by the editors of Foreign Affairs, among the most ardent guardians of the realist status quo.


    Waltz’s preference for A, favoring an Iranian bomb, is an extension of his long-standing belief that proliferation as actually desirable based on a view of global security that depends on sustaining power balances. In my judgment this carries confidence in the logic of deterrence (that is, the rationality of not using the bomb because of a fear of nuclear retaliation) to absurd degrees that go well beyond even the extreme rationality relied upon by the most influential war thinkers during the Cold War era. In this sense, Waltz is correct to equate the Middle East with the rest of the world, and not engage in the widespread practice of ethno-religious profiling: that is, Israel’s bomb is okay because it is a rational and ‘Western,’ while Iran’s bomb would be a world order disaster as it is irrational and governed by Islamic zealots that have declared their implacable hostility to Israel. If such distinctions are to be made, which is doubtful, it should be appreciated that Israel is the antagonist that has been threatening war and pushing for coercive diplomacy, while it is Iran that has so far peacefully tolerated a variety of severe provocations, acts of war, such as the assassination of several of its nuclear scientists, the infecting of its enrichment centrifuges with the Stuxnet virus, and verified violent covert acts designed to destabilize the Tehran regime. Had such incidents been reversed, it is more than 100% likely that Israel would have immediately gone to war against Iran, quite likely setting the entire region on fire.


    Objections to Option A


    My basic objection to the Waltz position is a disagreement with two of his guiding assumptions: first, with respect to the region, that other countries would not follow Iran across the nuclear threshold, an assessment he bases largely on their failure to acquire nuclear weapons in response to Israel’s acquisition of the capability. Surely Saudi Arabia and Turkey would not, for reasons of international status and perceived security, want to be non-nuclear states in a neighborhood in which both Israel and Iran had the bomb. Such an expansion of the regional nuclear club would become more prone to accident, miscalculation, and the sort of social and political pathology that makes nuclear weaponry generally unfit for human use in a conflict, whatever the region or occasion. In this respect, the more governments possess the bomb, the more likely it becomes that one of those horrible scenarios about a nuclear war will become history.


    And secondly, Waltz does not single out nuclear weapons for condemnation on either ethical or prudential grounds. In fact, he seems to hold the view that we can be thankful for the bomb as otherwise the Cold War would likely have resulted in a catastrophic World War III. In my view to have sought the bomb and then used it against the helpless Japanese at the end of World War II was certainly one of the worst instances of Promethean excess in human history, angering not only the gods but exhibiting a scary species death wish. Leaders have acknowledged this moral truth from time to time, most recently by Barack Obama in his 2009 Prague speech calling for a world without nuclear weapons, but politicians, including Obama, seem unable and unwilling to take the heat that following through would certainly entail. In the end, anti-nuclearism for leaders seems mainly an exercise in rhetoric, apparently persuasive in Norway where the Nobel Prize committee annually ponders the credentials of candidates, but without any behavioral consequences relating to the weaponry itself.  To be sure nuclear policies are challenged from time to time by a surge of anti-nuclear populism. In this regard, to favor the acquisition of the bomb by any government or political organization is to embrace the nuclearist fallacy relating to security and the absurd hubris of presupposing an impeccable rationality over long stretches of time, which has never been the case in human affairs.


    The secrecy surrounding policy bearing on nuclear weapons, especially the occasions of their possible use, also injects an absolutist virus into the vital organs of a democratic body politic. There is no participation by the people or even their representatives in relation to this most ultimate of political decisions, vesting in a single person, and perhaps including his most intimate advisors, a demonic capability to unleash such a catastrophic capability. We now know that even beyond the devastation and radiation, the smoke released by the use of as few as 50 nuclear bombs would generate so much smoke as to block sunlight from the earth for as long as a decade, dooming much of the agriculture throughout the world, a dynamic that has been called ‘a nuclear famine.’ As disturbing as such a possibility should be to those responsible for the security of society, there is little evidence that such a realization of the secondary effects of nuclear explosions is even present in political consciousness. And certainly the citizenry is largely ignorant of such a dark eventuality bound up with the retention of nuclear weapons.


    It is for these reasons that I would call Kenneth Waltz dangerous, not crazy. Indeed, it is his extreme kind of instrumental rationality that is dominant in many influential venues, and helps explain the development, possession, and apparent readiness to use nuclear weapons under certain conditions despite the risks and the immorality of the undertaking. If human society is ever to be again relatively safe, secure, and morally coherent, a first step is to renounce nuclear weapons unconditionally and proceed with urgency by way of an agreed, phased, monitored, and verified international agreement to ensure their elimination from the face of the earth. It is not only that deterrence depends on perfect rationality over time and across space, it is also that the doctrine and practices of deterrence amounts to a continuing crime against humanity of unprecedented magnitude and clarity!   

  • Wake Up! Washington’s Alarming Foreign Policy

    The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the RomanRepublic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome’s most brilliant and successful general, stopped with his army at the Rubicon, contemplated what he was about to do, and then plunged south. The Republic exploded in civil war, Caesar became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman Senate by politicians who saw themselves as ridding the Republic of a tyrant. However, Caesar’s death generated even more civil war, which ended only in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian, took the title Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a military dictatorship with himself as “emperor” for life. Thus ended the great Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase “to cross the Rubicon” has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an irrevocable step.

    I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own Rubicon. Until last year’s presidential election, ordinary citizens could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George Bush’s doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush’s war changed into America’s war and his conduct of international relations became our own.

    This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible. During the Watergate scandal of the early ’70s, the president’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. “John,” he said, “once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s very hard to get it back in.” This homely warning by a former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation of the United States after the reelection of George W. Bush.

    James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently posed for me the question “How should US foreign policy be changed so that the United States can play a more positive role on the world stage?” For me, this raises at least three different problems that are interrelated. The first must be solved before we can address the second, and the second has to be corrected before it even makes sense to take up the third.

    Sinking the Ship of State

    First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy, which, if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign policy moot. Within the next few months, the mother of all financial crises could ruin us and turn us into a North American version of Argentina, once the richest country in South America. To avoid this we must bring our massive trade and fiscal deficits under control and signal to the rest of the world that we understand elementary public finance and are not suicidally indifferent to our mounting debts.

    Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of other nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter not so much of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes. If we ignore this, changes in our actual foreign policies will not even be noticed by other nations of the world. I have in mind things like the Army’s and the CIA’s secret abduction and torture of people; the trigger-happy conduct of our poorly trained and poorly led troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; and our ideological bullying of other cultures because of our obsession with abortion and our contempt for international law (particularly the International Criminal Court) as illustrated by Bush’s nomination of John R. “Bonkers” Bolton to be US ambassador to the United Nations.

    Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our penchant for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform our foreign policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving evolutionary changes in the global balance of power that demand new approaches. The most important evidence that our life as the “sole” superpower is going to be exceedingly short is the fact that our monopoly of massive military power is being upstaged by other forms of influence. Chief among these is China’s extraordinary growth and our need to adjust to it.

    Let me discuss each of these three problems in greater depth.

    In 2004, the United States imported a record $617.7 billion more than it exported, a 24.4 percent increase over 2003. The annual deficit with China was $162 billion, the largest trade imbalance ever recorded by the United States with a single country. Equally important, as of March 9, 2005, the public debt of the United States was just over $7.7 trillion and climbing, making us easily the world’s largest net debtor nation. Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. This situation has become increasingly unstable, as the United States requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order to protect themselves from dollar depreciation will likely produce a meltdown of the American economy. On February 21, 2005, the Korean central bank, which has some $200 billion in reserves, quietly announced that it intended to “diversify the currencies in which it invests.” The dollar fell sharply and the US stock market (although subsequently recovering) recorded its largest one-day fall in almost two years. This small incident is evidence of the knife-edge on which we are poised.

    Japan possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, which at the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China also sits on a $609.9 billion pile of US cash, earned from its trade surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American government insults China in every way it can, particularly over the status of China’s breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider recently noted, “Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly. … American leadership has … become increasingly delusional – I mean that literally – and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it.”

    These deficits and dependencies represent unusual economic statistics for a country with imperial pretensions. In the 19th century, the British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the First World War, Britain had a surplus amounting to 7 percent of its GDP. America’s current account deficit is close to 6 percent of our GDP.

    In order to regain any foreign confidence in the sanity of our government and the soundness of our policies, we need, at once, to reverse President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, including those on capital gains and estates (the rich are so well off they’ll hardly notice it), radically reduce our military expenditures, and stop subsidizing agribusinesses and the military-industrial complex. Only a few years ago the United States enjoyed substantial federal surpluses and was making inroads into its public debt. If we can regain fiscal solvency, the savers of Asia will probably continue to finance our indebtedness. If we do not, we risk a fear-driven flight from the dollar by all our financiers, collapse of our stock exchange and global recession for a couple of years – from which the rest of the world will ultimately emerge. But by then we who no longer produce much of anything valuable will have become a banana republic. Debate over our foreign policy will become irrelevant. We will have become dependent on the kindness of strangers.

    Ugly Americans

    Meanwhile, the bad manners of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their band of neoconservative fanatics from the American Enterprise Institute dominate the conduct of American foreign policy. It is simply unacceptable that after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal Congress has so far failed to launch an investigation into those in the executive branch who condoned it. It is equally unacceptable that the president’s chief apologist for the official but secret use of torture is now the attorney general, that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not resign, and that the seventh investigation of the military by the military (this time headed by Vice Admiral Albert Church III) again whitewashed all officers and blamed only a few unlucky enlisted personnel on the night shift in one cellblock of Abu Ghraib prison. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a veteran of 23 years of service as an army officer, says in his book The New American Militarism of these dishonorable incidents: “The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.” Until this is corrected, a president and secretary of state bloviating about freedom and democracy is received by the rest of the world as mere window-dressing.

    Foreign policy analysts devote considerable attention to the concept of “credibility” – whether or not a nation is trustworthy. There are several ways to lose one’s credibility. One is to politicize intelligence, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did in preparing for their preventive war against Iraq. Today, only a fool would take at face value something said by the CIA or our other secret intelligence services. China has already informed us that it does not believe our intelligence on North Korea, and our European allies have said the same thing about our apocalyptic estimates on Iran.

    Similarly, our bloated military establishment routinely makes pronouncements that are untrue. The scene of a bevy of generals and admirals – replete with campaign ribbons marching up and over their left shoulders – baldly lying to congressional committees is familiar to any viewer of our network newscasts.

    For example, on February 3, 1998, Marine pilots were goofing off in a military jet and cut the cables of a ski lift in northern Italy, plunging 20 individuals to their deaths. The Marine Corps did everything in its power to avoid responsibility for the disaster, then brought the pilots back to the States for court-martial, dismissed the case as an accident and exonerated the pilots. The Italians haven’t forgotten either the incident or how the United States treated an ally. On March 4, 2005, American soldiers opened fire on a civilian car en route to Baghdad airport, killing a high-ranking Italian intelligence officer and wounding the journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by kidnappers. The US military immediately started its cover-up, claiming that the car was speeding, that the soldiers had warned it with lights and warning shots and that the Italians had given no prior notice of the trip. Sgrena has contradicted everything our military said. The White House has called it a “horrific accident,” but whatever the explanation, we have once again made one of our closest European allies look like dupes for cooperating with us.

    In its arrogance and overconfidence, the Bush administration has managed to convince the rest of the world that our government is incompetent. The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refuses to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States’ democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite our boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty so far endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.

    Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. The conference’s final statement also produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity” but did so without making slaveholding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, our walkout seemed to be yet another display of imperial arrogance – a bald-faced message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

    Until the United States readopts the norms of civilized discourse among nations, it can expect other nations – quietly and privately – to do everything in their power to isolate and disengage from us.

    Future Reforms

    If through some miracle we were able to restore fiscal rationality, honesty and diplomacy to their rightful places in our government, then we could turn to reforming our foreign policies. First and foremost, we should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never again fail to honor article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution giving it the exclusive power to go to war. After that, I believe the critical areas in need of change are our policies toward Israel, imported oil, China and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, although the environment and relations with Latin America may be equally important.

    Perhaps the most catastrophic error of the Bush administration was to abandon the policies of all previous American administrations to seek an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Bush instead joined Ariel Sharon in his expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. As a result, the United States has lost all credibility, influence and trust in the Islamic world. In July 2004, Zogby International Surveys polled 3,300 Arabs in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. When asked whether respondents had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of the United States, the “unfavorables” ranged from 69 to 98 percent. In the year 2000 there were 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, some 22 percent of the global population; through our policies we have turned most of them against the United States. We should resume at once the role of honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians that former President Clinton pioneered.

    The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest levels ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf countries. A cut-off of Saudi Arabia’s ability or willingness to sell its oil to us would, at the present time, constitute an economic catastrophe. By using currently available automotive technologies as well as those being incorporated today in new Toyota and Honda automobiles, we could end our entire dependency on Persian Gulf oil. We should do that before we are forced to do so.

    China’s gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent, easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world’s sixth largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge amounts of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the United States adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China – the world’s oldest, continuously extant civilization – this time as a modern superpower? Or is China’s ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war like those of the last century? That is what is at stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a threat to the United States and cooperation with it is our best guarantee of military security in the Pacific.

    Nothing is more threatening to our nation than the spread of nuclear weapons. We developed a good policy with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which with its 188 adherents is the most widely supported arms control agreement ever enacted. Only India, Israel and Pakistan remained outside its terms until January 10, 2003, when North Korea withdrew. Under the treaty, the five nuclear-weapons states (the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom) agree to undertake nuclear disarmament, while the non-nuclear-weapons states agree not to develop or acquire such weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is authorized to inspect the non-nuclear-weapons states to ensure compliance. The Bush administration has virtually ruined this international agreement by attempting to denigrate the IAEA, by tolerating nuclear weapons in India, Israel, and Pakistan while fomenting wars against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and by planning to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Our policy should be to return at once to this established system of controls.

    Finally, the most important change we could make in American policy would be to dismantle our imperial presidency and restore a balance among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. The massive and secret powers of the Department of Defense and the CIA have subverted the republican structure of our democracy and left us exposed to the real danger of a military takeover. Reviving our constitutional system would do more than anything else to protect our peace and security.

    Chalmers Johnson is the author of the Blowback Trilogy. The first two books of which, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic – are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written.

    Originally published by In These Times – Online