Reflections on a dialogue on A World Without War

The conversation on the Spanish language edition of A World Without War – The History, Politics and Resolution of Conflict (Un Mundo Sin Guerra), between Strategic Foresight co-founder Sundeep Waslekar and head of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, Hector Cardenas, was as profound as its insights were original. A few reflections from afar.

Among so much that could and should inform the broader deliberation and debate, the “counter-narratives” suggested by Mr. Waslekar are essential.

Let’s start with the triple crisis: the crisis of morality, the crisis of institutions, and the crisis of technology evolving faster than we and our institutions can effectively cope. That assessment of a very harsh reality leaves one troubled.

Meanwhile, our primary resource to cope with such challenges is being rapidly eroded by the destruction of our ability to ponder complexity. I might go so far as to say this is a meta-insight. Say what you will about leaders a half century ago, Richard Nixon, Indira Gandhi, or Golda Meir, but criticisms will not include their ability to understand complexity. Today’s Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Viktor Orban, or others… well there certainly is less capacity for complexity. Perhaps Claudia Sheinbaum is an outlier in this regard. I’ve long made the argument that we often think of the complex as being synonymous with the complicated, that complexity is the opposite of simplicity. Complexity is something else. I have not quite figured out how to articulate it, but – unlike complicatedness – it can’t be reduced to its components. Simple and complicated are both on the same spectrum, if near to or at opposite ends. Complexity is on a different spectrum or plane. Getting a man on the moon in 1968 was extraordinarily complicated, but it was not complex. The anticipation of a pandemic, or the analysis of the confluence of factors increasing the risk of nuclear annihilation, is extremely complex – and complicated.

The “counter-narratives” include:

• A majority of states have already collectively decided not to have nuclear weapons. To put it in UN-speak, they have had an exercise of nuclear self-determination. A passing thought here is that by framing the rejection of militarism this way, perhaps the UN Charter (self-determination of peoples) can be stretched to cover the perversity of nuclear weapons, of even having an army – a topic for another day. On this latter point, a sizable plurality of nations – including Panama which manages one of the world’s most geopolitical waterways – has ruled out armies. Iceland is kind of interesting - a NATO member with a mere Coast Guard. Of course, one can argue this is enabled by defence pacts, that Panama, Costa Rica and other nations are essentially free riders. Still, the insight remains.

• Defence spending is exploding, reaching $2.7 trillion last year globally, but 163 countries have defence budgets of less than $2 billion. That, by contrast, is the police budget of Chicago. Said differently, a large American city spends more on police each year than 163 countries spend on militaries.

• The turn in the Waslekar/Cardenas discussion on the Freud-Einstein conversation is particularly intriguing. Can we balance the threat of our eroding ability to think in complex terms with a deeper understanding and appreciation for national maturity? Maybe we call it geopolitical maturity? Interesting, alas, that Switzerland’s public is moving away from its centuries-old commitment to neutrality. Geopolitical maturity might well be the title of Waslekar’s next book. I wonder if an index could be developed. What would be the indicators? The insights shared from Professor Alexandra Monne in Andorra, on social media and cognition, help in understanding this. A big topic.

• Since I started this note, I had lunch with my old friend (and former boss) George Friedman, the founder of Geopolitical Futures and its forerunner Stratfor (where I was editor-in-chief). I ran this by him. He concurred. His word is “sophistication.” The sophistication of political actors is declining, if not collapsing.

• Related to this insight of yours on maturity, two weeks ago I attended the TED AI conference in San Francisco. I hesitate to share my frustration with some of the leading attendees as it makes me sound like an old man grumbling about the spoiled youth. And my argument is not that at all. These 30-somethings with PhDs from MIT or Stanford are an impressive lot. Many are worth billions; most who are not yet billionaires are aspiring to be. They are a generation that is worldly and aware in ways our generation was not, frankly. But there’s a lack of intellectual or historical depth – in their own realms. The high energy physicist from Boston University who has never heard of physicist Amory Lovins. The business consultant from PwC who talks of flattening hierarchies, but was unaware that she was channelling Peter Drucker, who made this argument in the 1950s. There was the AI consultant talking about incremental improvements in industrial practices, who didn’t realize she was making the case of W. Edwards Deming, which goes back to the 1940s. I didn’t get to ask her, but I suspect his name would have drawn a blank stare. Thoughts on AI regulation abound, but no one seems aware of the 1975 Asilomar Conference that worked out more or less successful rules for managing genetic engineering. There’s a fascination with East-West synthesis among this cohort, but nobody seems aware of Buddhist Alan Watts, and the graduate university he founded- The California Institute of Integral Studies, in 1951 – even though the school is just down the street from where the conference was held. The venue for the gathering was the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, which was also the venue for the founding conference of the UN in 1945. In a past conversation, Mr. Waslekar and I have spoken of my father’s attendance as a journalist, but I might as well have been speaking of the House of Burgesses when there. The founding of the UN? Was Benjamin Franklin there? Brilliance among young people the likes the world has never seen, but a deterioration of knowledge of another kind… perhaps this is part of the deterioration of complex thinking.

• The discussion of psychiatry triggered my thoughts on Vamik Volkan. The question: can trauma be “un-learned.” Volkan did some pioneering work in the 1990s on Georgia, the former Yugoslavia and I think Central America. Most or all of this was in collaboration with the Carter Centre. Very interesting. Volkan is a Turkish Cypriot, who left shortly before or during the 1963 clashes, that crack which became today’s crevasse dividing the island. But he never got involved, to my knowledge, with Cyprus issues specifically. Instead, he preferred to use his insight as someone from a divided society as arbiter/negotiator of other ethnic conflicts. Some years back when I was editor-in-chief of the Hurriyet Daily News, Volkan consented to an interview (I didn’t conduct it) and he made an interesting comment on the Kurdish issue. He said something to the effect that the conflict is easier to address when it’s “ethnic” but not yet “racial” or “racialized.” His larger point being that race is entirely imagined. I believe he's an emeritus professor from/at the University of Virginia medical school. 

• The Anglo-American pitch to ban air power is particularly interesting. Was Billy Mitchell involved? I checked. And no, it doesn’t look like it, but he’s still interesting as the champion of air power who is a martyr in some circles. The US was never a member of the League. So it might be important to emphasize that the US supported in some way the UK proposal (according to ChatGPT) of the 1932-34 Disarmament Conference. (The UK also envisioned an exception for “police actions” in colonies.)

• The hydro diplomacy in Africa is heartening. More needs to be made of this. This success might be an inspiration, an example for action in other realms. 

• Latin America as a global or regional mediator is interesting. Dr. Cardenas’ take on this is fascinating. That LatAm is the only continent without a trans-border military war is something to note. I didn’t know that Mexico and Peru had broken off relations. Guyana and Venezuela could soon break this peaceful pattern. I checked with ChatGPT and the Cenepa War of 1995 between Bolivia and Peru, the last territorial skirmish, might be interesting to pursue as the border dispute was successfully mediated by Brazil. Back to Friedman, he’s working up a hypothesis that the “next China” is the southern cone of Argentina and Brazil. Once the two giants get synced, no slowing down. Maybe I’ll move to Uruguay. 

• On this, I was at another gathering with a group of people and my friend George Friedman a few weeks ago. He went on a long riff about the contours of the drug gangs really being developed by the KGB decades ago for various purposes of mischief and to disrupt US maritime traffic – particularly through the “Mona Passage” around Puerto Rico from the East Coast to the Panama Canal and between the Mississippi River and the Canal. Russia, he suggested, is dusting off this old playbook, using the dynamics of the cartels. Russia can’t impose sanctions or curtail imports to punish the United States like China. But it can still add costs. His hypothesis is that this bit of gamesmanship is what the Cuban missile crisis was really about. Anyhow, by Friedman’s logic, these random boat attacks are part of a larger bid to send a warning to Putin to stay out of the hemisphere. The cartels, particularly in Colombia by this logic, are still strongly influenced by Moscow. I’m not sold on this idea, but it’s interesting and Friedman is often right in his assessments that fall outside the mainstream of media and academia. Trump is wily, but is he that wily? It’s a perspective I’ve not heard before or since. One of the other guests was a retired Marine colonel. He rattled off all the military hardware – from aircraft carriers to a nuclear sub to a surge of troops into a formally abandoned military facility in Puerto Rico. “We have more firepower in the Caribbean right now than at any time since Reagan’s invasion of Grenada,” he said. That was in 1983.

• Mr. Waslekar’s anecdote about negotiating the Nobel laureates’ group statement is particularly compelling. This certainly illustrates the challenge of mediation. This insight pairs with his experience I’ve heard about elsewhere of negotiating in Kashmir and with Israel and the Palestinian Authority etc. That’s a story that should be told more often – Shimon Peres, the conference at Oxbridge that wasn’t, the negotiators that preferred to party and shop in London rather than come to a parley on water rights and sharing.

• I need to think a lot more about the comments on space and time. I’m trying to get through Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time. Relating this to the phenomenon of Tunisians going to ISIS-led Holy War in Syria is powerful. Could it be compared to the impulse of western leftists in the 1930s fighting (or pretending to fight) in the Spanish Civil War?

• The EU’s successes and fragilities were well-framed. Problems at the edges. The Dutch elections are heartening – which circles thinking back to your concept of geopolitical maturity. The Netherlands, even with Geert Wilders, would rank high on that list.

• NATO is another kettle of slippery fish. The original zombie bureaucracy from 1989 until Ukraine etc. gave it a raison d’etre. We should have/could have resolved this all in the 1990s. It is very difficult to do so now. But worth pondering.  But as was pointed out, Sweden and Finland’s signing up is a VERY bad omen.

• I’m still metabolizing the insight that the community of technologists – very broadly defined – is the only group right now capable of coherent global action. I’d like to discuss further. Ian Bremmer has written a great deal on the emerging “techno-polar” world. What other groups can cohere? Is your Group of 30 (the ones without armies) a starting point? The “No Armies Treaty Organization.” The alternative NATO? Just thinking out loud. So how do we empower the others? A friend who is the founder of a number of humanitarian aid groups has shared many stories about mediating between the technologists and the humanitarians – a big part of his job. The technology crowd is full of empathy, ready to provide money, but essentially dogmatic within the cultural wars that intersect with the political wars of America. They have mastered the universe and so they no longer need to listen. Or so they think.

• On the role of women, there is so much that is unrecognized. Liberia, and the movement among Muslim and Christian women that ended the civil war, is an amazing case study. Joslyn Barnhart’s recent book, the Suffragist Peace - How Women Shape the Politics of War  is remarkable. I just read it, and there is much to discuss here. But given the dialogue with Mexican intellectuals, the fact that women’s votes in the six western US states (that allowed women to vote before the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920) is worth noting. Their votes tossed the race narrowly to Woodrow Wilson – over the Republican incumbent Robert Taft and independent Teddy Roosevelt (then trying to regain the White House) who both favoured invasion of Mexico in 1914. This is a forgotten chapter of history in US-Mexico history. 

• Mr. Waslekar has long written and spoken of war being a “choice.” I fundamentally agree but wonder if there’s not more work to be done to develop the methodology of choice. How do we choose? Days ago, I had a very interesting conversation in a chance encounter at a coffee shop. This fellow was a native of Austin, Texas where I live. An African American, with a successful air conditioning business. Very smart guy. He explained that he “grew up on food stamps” (a big anti-hunger program for the poor imperilled by Trump) but he indicated his support of Trump as a struggling small businessman who feels abandoned by Democrats. So what are the “dynamics of choice”? As Trump merrily leads us to war, what are the mechanisms of the “consent of the governed?” Do we go deep Chomsky on manufactured consent? I don’t know.

• One exchange with Dr. Cardenas is a video clip you want to carve out: He asks: How does this new polycentric order work…? More or less chance of war? Mr Waslekar’s response was to elucidate two challenges:

• Challenge 1: In this inverted order of “de-maturization” (the reversal from a mature to a less mature political order) by the major powers, the decision-making is frequently prey to simplistic emotions. Many world leaders, including but not limited to Trump, simply cannot carry a complex thought. 

• Challenge 2: The lack of any system of broad legitimacy that can negotiate in trusted fashion with democracies, autocracies, and elected autocracies. Maybe Qatar sort of was, the Gulf states perhaps approach this role.