Diplomatic Solutions
Less than a year ago at the 76th UN general assembly, President Biden delivered remarks addressing the end of the two decades-long occupation of Afghanistan. “We’ve turned the page.” He said, and “And as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” It seems as though Biden was performing international triage here; this was his attempt at showing the global community that US world dominance could continue politely and palatably after the abrasive and mercurial Trump administration. No longer would this country be so gauche as to blatantly leverage military might to determine international politics. But if we view diplomacy as a place of relentless competition then we never depart from those destructive, all-or-nothing frameworks that fuel armed conflicts. Does ‘relentless’ diplomacy imply the unwavering commitment to good-faith, mutualistic dialogue? Or does it mean that the US will transition from hot and bloody nuclear superpower to cool and commanding economic hegemon? Prioritizing diplomacy is a wager on peace; it could be an alternative to those attitudes that push nations into war but only if we grant, even to our enemies, the dignity that we would to an equal partner. The US claims its foundations lie in the pursuit of liberty and democracy; we should ensure that our diplomacy reflects this!
An article recently published by the Center for a New American Strategy (or CNAS, a ‘bipartisan’ think tank devoted to influencing US strategic policy on behalf of a rogue’s gallery of donors including Northrop Grumman, the Charles Koch Institute, Boeing, and Amazon) shows us how seriously our political class is about honest negotiations as foreign policy. The article, titled: “Long Shadows: Deterrence in a Multipolar Nuclear Age,” makes abundantly clear that “relentless diplomacy” will serve as justification for “improving strategic stability and enhancing deterrence,” that is: continuing to build our nuclear arsenal.
“This is not to suggest that the United States should give up its long-term goal of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national strategy. But American leaders must be clear-eyed about the current security environment and aware of the potential repercussions of suddenly changing its nuclear policy and posture in a very dynamic and increasingly dangerous nuclear environment.”
Pettyjohn and Matuschak consider drawing down our nuclear arsenal tantamount to geopolitical naïvety. Nuclear politics, unfortunately, is a zero-sum game. There is no ‘minor’ nuclear disaster, each day these weapons remain stockpiled and ready brings us closer to the day when they are used (again) as tools of war — from which there may be no coming back. If the strategy affords no serious consideration to non-proliferation then why even pay lip service? CNAS’s arms trading donors are not asking for nuclear disarmament, nor do either of the dominant political parties. The notion that the United States must continue to stockpile weapons to fuel military dominance figures so centrally to our international politics that it’s baffling to see this considered a “New American Strategy!” This is ‘relentless diplomacy:’ no attempt to engage the enemy with a sense of mutuality nor to dissolve those boundaries that make them a foe in the first place. ‘Relentless diplomacy’ is the US tactic of whitewashing militarism so that it does not seem illiberal to the general public.
Nothing guarantees that raising the stakes of nuclear war will make the world a safer place. The pursuit of unquestionable, untestable power is incompatible with peace: it perpetuates a military-industrial complex which diverts resources away from vital civic projects and pushes nations to brinkmanship like what we see between Russia and the NATO block today over the invasion of Ukraine. Nuclear weapons waste labor and resources that could be better spent addressing climate change: a real catastrophe that is happening to us right now. We should expect our nation’s administration to prioritize diplomacy, we should pursue international cooperation relentlessly. However, peace will require a kind of conviction that this nation and its think tanks have so far failed to muster.
