World Order

by Henry Kissinger

To outraged complaints that, as a cardinal, he owed a duty to the universal and eternal Catholic Church—which would imply an alignment against the rebellious Protestant princes of Northern and Central Europe—Richelieu cited his duties as a minister to a temporal, yet vulnerable, political entity. Salvation might be his personal objective, but as a statesman he was responsible for a political entity that did not have an eternal soul to be redeemed. “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he said. “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”

What is the unifing value system of the Open movement online? What is its organisation and method of compensation? If Bitcoin, Reddit Gold, Stellar, patreon and torrent ratio systems are internal economies, can we make a system that facilitates their reconciliation and trade? These are the birth pangs of a new society.

Austria learned too late that in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.

That's foreboding for the US.

But a country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.

In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life.

In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism.

The Arthashastra’s exhaustive and matter-of-fact catalogue of the imperatives of success led the distinguished twentieth-century political theorist Max Weber to conclude that the Arthashastra exemplified “truly radical ‘Machiavellianism’ . . . compared to it, Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.”

The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had “principles” and “destiny” was as old as the Republic. What was new was that a global geopolitical contest in which the United States was the leader, not a bystander, was justified primarily on moral grounds, and the American national interest was disavowed.

The neoliberal perspective of gutting American industry to give economic opportunity and liberty to citizens of foreign states falls in this camp.

As America examines the lessons of its twenty-first-century wars, it is important to remember that no other major power has brought to its strategic efforts such deeply felt aspirations for human betterment. There is a special character to a nation that proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their people—that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty.

Every other world order thus far introduced-- Communism, Islam, even Monarchy-- all share this same perspective of themselves and their goals. Even Kissinger falls to an idealistic motivation in the end.

The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order—the West’s own creation—had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

This only is true if the military is accountable to a body politic. Why did the USSR, as an example of an undemocratic totalitarian state, exit their conflict in Afghanistan?

No government, even the most totalitarian, has been able to arrest the flow or to resist the trend to push ever more of its operations into the digital domain. Most of the democracies have an ingrained instinct that an attempt to curtail the effects of an information revolution would be impossible and perhaps also immoral. Most of the countries outside the liberal-democratic world have set aside attempts to shut out these changes and turned instead to mastering them. Every country, company, and individual is now being enlisted in the technological revolution as either a subject or an object.

Conflicts within and between societies have occurred since the dawn of civilization. The causes of these conflicts have not been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share it. They have arisen not only between societies that do not understand each other but between those that understand each other only too well.

The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience.