Reflections on the State of Israel: An Essay for Peace

In some sense, no state as such is ever justified; or rather, the formative period of every nation-state always entails a measure of violence, displacement, disputation, conflict … and the loss of historical memory of such, and the consequent formation of an origins-myth that, perhaps, blots out the uncomfortable (and inconvenient) truth about this originating violence.

And yet, the modern State of Israel as it exists now is not so ancient of a statal formation as to have its origins lost in the mists of history; and hence, a moral calculus of its origins is still possible with the facticity of history still capable – because it is still within living memory – of providing a bulwark against the exigencies of origin myth-making that has always complicated the autobiography of nation-states, where that narrative is too-easily compromised by ethnicism or racism. What follows is, I hope, a moral or even a spiritual reckoning with the facts of Israel’s formative period.

It seems fairly clear: the idea of a modern State of Israel was born from Zionism: a religio-political movement to find a home for a people variously hated, excluded, and alienated on the basis of their cultural and spiritual affiliation with an ancient Semitic minority religion. Scholars of Judaism tell a compelling story of a people – the Hebrews – consistently bullied, oppressed and colonized, even in their own historical homeland. The sequence was brutal, and unrelenting: after hundred of years of captivity in Egypt, it was Babylon; then the Alexandrian Greeks; and then the Cesarian Romans … followed by a great diaspora into the West (and Eurasia), South into the Arabian peninsula, and into the regions of the North. And that historical homeland is, factually, to be found in the regions of what we call the Levant: the Kingdom of Israel more or less covered the areas which Zionism, in its ideological attempt to reclaim a lost historical geography, sought, eventually, to re-appropriate – based on this history.

To this extent the United States shares a deep spiritual kinship with the modern State of Israel, which perhaps today operates more at the level of the political unconscious. What is the U.S., after all, but a “fragment society” configured from minoritarian religious movements which the Old World sought to expel – or at least oppress? Mixed with this, of course, were the misfits of mercantilism, prospectors seeing wealth in a New World of natural resources seemingly untouched, a reserve simply there waiting to be appropriated (what was it that was in Columbus’ eyes as he arrived in the Americas: gold). And this admixture of rouge religious experimentalism (spiritual misfits feeling excluded or actively oppressed) and mercantilist entrepreneurialism eventuated in the American U.S. “thing”, a Protestant Christianity that saw a new Bible in the Gospel of Prosperity.

And yet, what did we find here as these colonies formed in North America? An uncomfortable truth: that these lands had already been appropriated by those whom we call “indigenous” – which is, aside from its academic ideological import, just short-hand for “people who were here (long) before you were”. Of course, the formation of the eventual United States was another act of human fiat, the placing of a flag (almost literally) in the ground with the declaration that “now this is mine” – over against any existing claims, claims which, in the fullness of time, are brutally substantiated with the naked assertion of superior technological power (in the form of guns and steel, aided by the contingent fact of germs, as Jarod Diamond long ago argued). And just to this extent a violent act of expropriation and displacement, the (im)moral groundwork for an enduring hypocrisy even as the U.S. struggles to maintain the liberal democratic moral high ground it still sees itself as holding.

Are these respective factive origins of the U.S. and the modern State of Israel, then, substantially different – at least morally or spiritually? They are profoundly parallel, strategically consistent. The “nakba” – the catastrophe – of the formative period of the U.S. finds its recapitulation in the “nakba” of the founding of the Israeli State … from the point of view of the indigenous peoples, of course.

Surely the desire of an oppressed people to find peace and respite in a land – a place, a topos – of their own is morally and spiritually valid. And the Earth in principle, with its great abundance of place, affords this possibility of a preliminary and preparatory nomadic wandering across its surface in search of the peace of place. To be situated in a place of one’s own is perhaps the birthright of all creatures – a place free of predation, oppression, external determination. It is, perhaps, the existential origin of democracy itself, or its metaphysical spring: the allure of the freedom of place, won by nomadic wandering in search of peace and self-determination, autonomy. It is a beautiful idea, and a real – even vital – possibility held open to all oppressed peoples.

Yet, can this existential need justify immoral means to such moral (even metaphysical) ends? Can we not discern in the logic of the specific means an even more universal call – the call of what Kant might call here “Cosmopolitanism”? Is not the Earth itself an open land for all? Does this pursuit of peace by the oppressed and the excluded not in fact disclose a deeper political metaphysic: the critique of borders, of divisions and tribal identities which carve the world into conflictual territories, a territorialism reflected and innervated in the ensuing politics of settled States?

We must, though, pull back from such idealism, which may, in time, provide a means to regulate our future political aspirations as we face the realities of an increasingly uninhabitable planet in the Anthropocene. The fact remains that, like the formation by fiat of the U.S. itself, the State of Israel (by fiat) remains a nation formed from catastrophe (the Nakba), a consequence of political machinations that left an enduring legacy of exclusion and oppression for the people which this statal formation had to exclude and internally displace – a tragedy we see reproduced and furthered today in the War on Gaza (a war justified as one of self-defense, but whose asymmetric form argues against its ultimate moral justifiability as it is being now fought, that is: as a war of rageful vengeance).

What, then, is the story of Palestine?

It is a tragedy in four acts (and hence, literarily at least, somewhat imbalanced).

The Levant, and the region eventually designated “Palestine”, was, as history shows, a region always shuffled among dominant political powers. In the tragic sequence of oppression of the Hebrew-Semitic peoples, the ancient Judaic Kingdoms found themselves under foreign rule, the last of which leads to a dispersion of Judaic peoples throughout the Western (and Eurasian) world, and into the Arabian Peninsula in the desert south. In late antiquity, with the rise of another Semitic theologico-political order – Islam – we saw various Caliphates take over political governance of the region. But Act One ends (in about 70 CE) with the Roman-led destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the ensuing Judaic diaspora. The Jews would henceforth find themselves a fragmented theologico-political group with no nation or geographical center formed by their own designs, instead bound by their religious-spiritual storytelling which kept the history of their oppression and exclusion a living reality, encoded in key texts and commentarial traditions (e.g. the Talmud).

Eventually, the Roman Empire morphs into the Byzantine (a Greek-inflected Imperium) as the Western Roman Empire collapses (in around 500 CE), and lasts until the great Islamic Conquests of the Seventh Century that lead to the formation of the Great Islamic Caliphates, which endure for centuries. Act Two ends with defeat of the Axis Powers of World War One by the Allies, which in turn ensures the collapse of the lumbering (and already moribund) Ottoman Empire – the last great Islamic Caliphate (the bane of the Arab Muslim world for centuries, and a motivating cause of the independence movements – in Egypt, Arabia, etc. – that peppered the Muslim world in the 19th and early 20th centuries). Overnight, the dominant political authority that had organized and effectively managed the region – Palestine – was gone. In its place, from on-high, there descended on the region some of the key Western Allied powers, still with a lingering (and soon-to-die) imperialism of their own: namely, the British and the French, who carved up the region like a Christmas goose, creating by paper fiat political borders that had little relation to existing ethnic-cultural identities or bonds – a situation all but guaranteed by the nebulous zone of political determination imposed by the Ottomans (who in any case just considered the region as a whole an extension of their own). From this borderless, now suddenly defunct, imperial zone of control was born a Franekstein’s monster by the new (albeit transitional) imperial overlords: “Mandatory Palestine,” now under the titular rule of the British.

Act Three of this tragedy ends with the fateful promise of the British to the leaders of the Zionist movement, who sought out a repetition of the legendary Promised Judaic Land: the recreation of a theologico-political order – a nation-state – for the diasporic Jews who had faced, for centuries, oppression and exclusion in Europe, Eurasia and elsewhere. Though not initially a target for this re-immigration program, Mandatory Palestine was eventually settled upon – for largely mythological (which is to say, theologico-religious) reasons: it was in truth where Judaism began long ago.

Finally, Act Four is the Nakba itself: the catastrophe. Only minutes after the British declared their exit from Mandatory Palestine, the Zionist leader Ben Gurion, as had been the plan, simply declared the formation of the State of Israel. The catastrophe here is simple: the declaration of a State of Israel, grounded in and motivated by the ideology of Zionism, had no corresponding declaration of statehood for the non-Jewish Muslim Arabs – who, in any case, had little to no participation in this fiat statehood. Indeed, the symbol chosen for the new state flag of Israel – the Star of David – is a specifically Jewish symbol, thus signaling in an instant that it was a religious group, and therefore an exclusionary group, that was in charge. It wasn’t the Muslims who got a state; it was the Jews. Hence, the enduring conflict which is the modern State of Israel – a state sadly inconceivable and even nonexistent without this conflict.

The horrible coda to this nakba which is Act Four of Palestine’s tragic story is the sequence of Arab or Muslim states, or internal Palestinian groups, who sought to fight on behalf of the now stateless Palestinian people – to give voice to the voiceless. And the latest episode of this catastrophic mini-series is the terrorist attack of 7 October perpetrated by Hamas against innocent civilians, while its mafiosi leaders pontificate for the Palestinian people and the cause of freedom in relative comfort, ensconced in luxurious enclaves in oil-rich Gulf statelets. What perhaps Hamas and similar mafia gangs fail to realize is the power and the meaning of the freedom they so want for the Palestinian people: it means and demands autonomy not only from the Israeli apartheid oppressors, but also from the tyranny of their own authoritarian “freedom” fighting which poses as a stand-in for the Palestinians themselves (a false – and forced – government of thugs). Autonomy means self-determination, not the rule by fear of the armed strongmen. If Hamas were to achieve its stated aims (the liberation of the Palestinian people by the destruction of the State of Israel), we would only have another Reign of Terror, an inversion of an already-immoral situation which would not achieve lasting peace or prosperity.

And here we find ourselves having to face a practical reality: that Israel has become, with the help of the U.S. and other Western allies, a powerful example of a liberal democracy bolstered by a strong and productive economy – the strongest in the region. The tragedy then is that something similar cannot be said for a Palestinian state. But we cannot reverse the tragic historical origins of Israel, as the U.S. cannot do for its own immoral past. The moral illegitimacy of Israel’s origins in a Zionist expropriation of indigenous Palestinian land can never be an argument for Israel’s extirpation or dissolution; but a recognition of the specific nature of these origins – whatever their moral status – in an asymmetrical fiat statehood can be used for the affirmation and creation of a parallel state that ought to have been formed at the same moment: the creation of an autonomous State of Palestine. This would be simultaneously a reckoning with Zionism as an exclusionary undemocratic founding ideology, and a recognition that such a mixture of politics and religion should never be the basis of modern state formation; the only price to be paid then by the Palestinians would be an equally religiously-neutral State, organized around the ethnic historical ties that bind a people together–a parallel Arab state that must seek peaceful coexistence with its Jewish-Israeli brothers and sisters.

I hope it is clear, then, that this anti-Zionist thesis is the very opposite of antisemitism, for it argues not for anything like the repudiation of the existing Jewish-Israeli State, or its destruction, or even for harm to be done (in vengeance or retribution for wrongs committed, which seems to be the factual motivating factor behind the Israeli War on Gaza) but only that the founding of the one out of need for the peace of a place of one’s own should equally apply for the Palestinians whose dwelling was expropriated on the basis of an exclusionary ideology of territorial reappropriation, which is what Zionism came to be, in actual practice and material social expression (the necessary passage from idea or ideology to material and social reality is a pathway that cannot be bypassed, for as Hegel realized, every idea finds its time in the concrete historical circumstances of the people the idea has captured).

The Flowers of Resentment

In their text The Light That Failed: Why The West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy, published in 2019, authors Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue for a very interesting (perhaps even profound) socio-psychological explanation for the current rise of illiberal, anti-democratic authoritarianism of the sort we see taking hold in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the work of French philosopher René Girard, who argues that imitation has long been a neglected dimension driving history and the human condition, the authors argue that the current rise of illiberalism throughout Europe has to do with resentment, a toxic consequence of imitation.

The most destabilizing form of imitation, Girard argues, is the imitation of desire. As the authors summarize Girard, we desire only because others desire something. Desire is, of course, more complicated than this, but, aside from the obvious question (can it just be desiring what others desire … all the way down? Surely there must be something about an object that makes it of a sort to be desired in the first place, that is: for what it is, or appears to be and not just because someone else wants it?), the point is simple: in desiring something just because someone else finds it desirable, you imitate the desires of another. So who are you? What do you really want? Just what others want? This establishes both inner psychological conflict, as well as obvious outer social conflict. “The more confidence that imitators have in those they imitate, tellingly, the less confidence they have in themselves. The model being imitated is inevitably a rival and a threat to self-respect,” especially if “the model is not Jesus Christ in heaven but your neighbor to the west” (p. 12).

Eventually, the mimicry wears thin, and in any case with only this parasitic identity, how can you really measure up? Mimicry isn't the real thing, is it? A copy of democracy is just a copy. Resentment seems to be around the corner. But crucially, at least for a while, the mimicry is politically and economically advantageous, right? Especially if you can get something you want in the process.

Building on the socio-psychological dynamics of imitation/resentment, then, the authors shift the thesis to a political-economic register, and argue that:

The origins of today's worldwide anti-liberal revolt lie in three parallel, interconnected and resentment-fueled reactions to the presumptively canonical status of Western political models after 1989. That is the thesis we wish to explore and defend, with all due awareness of its one-sidedness, incompleteness and empirical vulnerabilities. Our aim is not to produce a comprehensive and definitive account of the causes and consequences of contemporary anti-liberalism but to emphasize and illustrate one specific aspect of the story that has yet to garner the attention that we believe it deserves. To highlight the sometime hidden affinities among our three cases of reactionary nativism and authoritarianism, we have relied on a flexibly articulated and admittedly speculative but, we hope, coherent and revealing concept of political imitation (p. 13).

The real question is that if this is (at least in part) true of the current sociopolitical situation, then what is to be done about it? Is there a way out of the inevitable bind into which such socio-psychological dynamics locks one? In other words, what could the appropriate solution be, and could this be translated into diplomatic terms implementable on the international political stage? It’s hard to say; but in any case, that’s for diplomatic strategists to debate…

I recently made asimilar argument, using instead Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment—a key notion in his withering meta-critique of Western (which is to say, Judeo-Christian) morality—to explain what’s at issue in Putin’s war on “The West”. Either way you slice it, there indeed is much resentment from Putin (if not from Russians themselves), and from other non-Western nations, at the fact of (real or perceived) Western European/American predominance in world politics. But what I tried to point out is that this predominance is rooted in a real historical circumstance: that Western European, and then American power radiated outward from the source of the power which is modernity itself: the power achieved by the exploitation of a new kind of knowledge of nature, delivered by the “exact sciences” whose basis was to be mathematics.

This mathematical-scientific achievement, however we might wish to contextualize it, or to analyze it in detail, became the necessary condition for Western European and eventually American power—not just from the science itself, and the technologies engineered from it, but also from the very profound shift of “mentalité” such a development entailed. What we might call the “technoscientific” standpoint towards nature, self and world really rewired social, political and even existential relations to the point that, at the end of the nineteenth century, global conflict of a sort that was hardly conceivable decades prior suddenly became possible—and on a scarcely imaginable scale. What is important is not so much the technoscientific developments (and ensuing social change) themselves, but the fact of its geographical (and temporal) unevenness: certain regions developed faster and became more productive, industrially, and it was this rapidity of industrial-technical development that yielded the advantages that would, in time, become economic and therefore strategic, especially since economic more than military power would increasingly shape world affairs at the end of the nineteenth, and into the twentieth century.

Except For All The Rest: NATO and the Defense of Democracy

In a bizarre coincidence of opposites, the incessant attacks from the academic Left on American “Empire” and global hegemony, with its supposed blowback in the form of Putin’s military and cyber aggression challenging American and NATO supremacy, are matched by right-wing populist (ie Trumpist) blame-mongering which seeks to shoulder responsibility of the outbreak of war in the Ukraine onto America, with its disastrous roster of foreign policy blunders and fruitless interventionism. The academic Left and populist Right both want to see what is unfolding in the Ukraine as a US-generated crisis, with the US’s poor choice of foreign policy throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s as proximate cause. For very different reasons, each side points to NATO and its “enlargement” as key to the problem.

For much of the academic Left, NATO represents not a defensive alliance so much as a political-economic (war) instrument for asserting American “world dominance” (as perhaps Chomsky would characterize it), an apparatus of US “imperial” power. For the (newer) Trumpist Right, it is an expensive and largely fruitless endeavor of the (bloated) US government which uses it to muck around in the affairs of nations we shouldn’t really be bothered with (“it’s not our problem” is perhaps the isolationist-Trumpist refrain for the regional conflicts in which NATO has intervened).

Perhaps both sides are committed to some kind of principle—largely tacit on the academic Left, but much more explicit on the populist Right—of American non-interventionism, if not military isolationism. Yet, the idea of a defensive alliance was crafted precisely to meet the dangers of inaction that attend a lack of decisive coordination among democratic nations faced with an existential threat, that is, when faced with a potential invader. Surely this must be the legitimate moral and political basis for an entity such as NATO. For different reasons such moral or political legitimacy is imperceptible to the academic Left and the populist Right.

In much of the discourse of the academic Left, it has become second nature to join the moral or political dimensions of global (or even regional) affairs to the economic. It is surely realistic to do so, for economics is a major determining factor of politics, and even to an extent shapes moral philosophy (though we may operate under the belief that it ought to be reversed). But equally surely this axiomatic conjunction is too “realistic” for it ignores that autonomy of ideals or principles which is the governing (moral) foundation of our political and economic practices. That there is a gap between principle and practice is no argument for the nonexistence of the former in favor of the latter (as Hegel well understood), nor for its impotency; rather that gap enables (and perhaps even defines) a notion of progress. Indeed, without it progress as such is inconceivable. But, perhaps as a consequence of the undue influence on the academic Left of Marx’s (largely inchoate or unfinished) materialist philosophy, a kind of “analytics of suspicion” reigns supreme where statements of principle by any military or political organization are met with a cynical skepticism—suspicion. This is of course not without justification in many cases, as it would be profoundly naïve to assume that statements of principle may not be nullified by the eventualities of action (speaking louder, as the saying goes, than the words). But we surely cannot allow this cautious (and prudent) “analytic of suspicion”, which checks the use of power against (we hope) higher moral principles than any one institution, often subject to multiple competing interests, can possibly maintain with consistency, to prevent us from seeing when and where an institution does have a moral legitimacy, when and where it can be made to obey its stated principles. That NATO may have been wrongly employed in some cases does not nullify its moral imperative in others. But in order to defend what legitimacy there is to the NATO alliance it is important that we distinguish— most especially “in theory” if not actually “in practice—its founding moral and political principles from the economic and “ideological” uses to which they are sometimes put. Insisting on this distinction provides the clarity necessary to not only establish legitimacy but to see it realized in actual policy. It must first be clear in theory before it can be sought in practice.

The entanglement between the moral/political principles, and the (exogenous) economic purposes to which the Alliance is sometimes, put was, I think, strengthened most by the ensuing loss of what Hegel might call NATO’s “negative identity” following the collapse of the Soviet Union—the Alliance’s raison d’être. During the post-war decades, as the Keynesian compromise was worked out (meant to save capitalist economies from the capitalist excesses of the early 20th century, and the ravages of WWII), there was an understanding that capitalist economic structures needed exogenous moral and political restraints, despite the undeniable practical realities of economic interests being a driving force for both moral and political life (one might call this economically-driven constellation of ideas “ideology”). Without such restraint, it was argued, we might see a repeat of the economic crises that precipitated the two world wars.

But, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr knew so well, one of the many (unfortunate) “ironies” of American history was that America lacked a meaningful tradition of robust moral-philosophical challenge to capitalist economy—America was “born bourgeois” and thus knows nothing else. To attempt to challenge the structures of capitalism in the US is tantamount to attacking America itself: the “American Way of Life”. In Europe, of course, such a tradition of moral-philosophical challenge does exist—after all there were centuries of European social life prior to the emergence of capitalism as a specific political and economic philosophy—and hence there is an underlying social and political philosophy available to restrain the excesses of unfettered capitalism. That the US would take the lead in the formation of NATO, then, has profound implications, as this would prime the Alliance to become in time an instrument to realize (frequently covert) economic interests as it used the rhetoric of “freedom” and “democracy” to explain its defensive aims—mirroring the internal political disposition of the US as a whole.

As the Second World War war became but a distant memory, the business of European reconstruction was underway (the Marshall Plan). The U.S., flush with cash and industrial might, itself untouched by the ravages of war, soon becomes obsessed with the evils of the Soviet Union—“communism”—and sees the post-war compromise of restrained capitalism gradually morph into an almost desperate attempt to reinvigorate capitalist economies as stagflation took hold in the core powers. Enter “neoliberalism”.

In the neoliberal age of increasingly strident and unabashed capitalist triumphalism (think the Regan-Thatcher years), NATO comes to represent (to those in the Soviet Bloc) more an instrument of capitalist “imperialism” or (for those in the Alliance itself) the axiomatic conjunction “democracy and free markets”. That is, given the new unshakeable faith in the necessary conjunction of capitalism and democracy (which holds that market freedom is the required condition for democracy itself), NATO was to defend capitalist political economy as a requirement of democracy. But this neoliberal capitalist order, the cause of so much of today's politics of suspicion (voiced within this strange coincidence of opposites the left and right have struck upon), has effectively come to an end; or, taking a more moderate (!) view, has really entered terminal decline (which has been the argument of political economist Wolfgang Streeck, as we see precisely argued in this lecture of January 2019 at the University of Manchester). What we in fact see, Michael Beckley persuasively argues in a recent edition of Foreign Affairs, is the emergence of an entirely new international order.

This new international order is a consequence of the antagonism now clearly forming and intensifying along two moral-political axes, with versions of illiberal authoritarianism on the one side and liberal democracies on the other. Since almost every authoritarianism participates in some form of capitalism—from China and Russia, to the left-wing governments of Latin America (we say almost, excepting the near autarkies of Venezuela, North Korea and Iran given that status by heavy Western economic sanctions, with Russia fast approaching this status too)—the only thing left to distinguish other nations, including the major Western powers, from this autocratic group is democracy itself. In other words, it is becoming clear that the only point of contestation with China and its cooperative allies is liberal democracy, which, in order to constitute a robust and real contrast, forces the old neoliberal order to adopt a new vision, a new ideology we might say, one that is no longer about how capitalism is the road to freedom, but how only in a democracy can that freedom necessary for capitalism be secured (where the implication is that capitalism is but one aspect of a larger sociopolitical whole). That is, the order of importance has, rather dramatically, shifted: democracy is fundamental to capitalist economy—not the other way round. "By infusing labor and human rights standards into economic agreements," writes Beckley, "the new vision prioritizes people over corporate profits and state power. It also elevates," he continues,

the global environment from a mere commodity to a shared and jointly protected commons. By linking democratic governments together in an exclusive network, the new order attempts to force countries to make a series of value judgments and impose real penalties for illiberal behavior. (March/April 2022 edition; p. 81)

But the "history of international order building," Beckley argues, striking a very realistic note, "is one of savage competition between clashing systems, not of harmonious cooperation" (ibid.). The antagonism and competitiveness are what drives the formation of the international order; they are its essential dynamics. Here, the dimension of Hegelian "negative identity" returns as the crucial element on the international scene—referred to by Beckley in more concrete ways as the sociological "in-group/out-group dynamic" or Sallust's Theorem, or, in political science, "negative partisanship ... the tendency for voters to become intensely loyal to one political party mainly because they despise its rival" (pp. 70-71). Thus, following a kind of post-modern interlude of unchallenged supremacy, brought about by the sudden disappearance (literally overnight) of the superpower against which the liberal democratic order had come to define itself, neoliberalism quite ironically could not sustain itself without a serious challenger to its identity. Lacking this challenge, neoliberalism quickly entered into an unsustainable phase, with increasingly strident globalist and internationalist political elites arguing for more and more locally (which is to say nationally or regionally) disagreeable trade deals, agreements and pacts. And for all of its political ideology of inclusion, it turned out that the neoliberal order was anything but. "By promoting free markets, open borders [both key to the globalist economy and therefore essential to the centrist parties dominating the politics of rich Western powers], democracy, supranational institutions, and the use of reason to solve problems," argues Beckley, "the order challenges traditional beliefs and institutions that have united communities for centuries: state sovereignty, nationalism, religion, race, tribe, family." And in this way, "by slaying its main adversary [the "illiberal" order represented by this veritable "basket of deplorables": tribalism, nationalism, etc., to borrow H.R. Clinton's formula], the liberal order unleashed all sorts of nationalist, populist, religious and authoritarian opposition" (p. 72). Does this not sum up the "grievances" Mr. Putin has with "The West"? Does it not also sum up those which Trump so strategically, if inelegantly, tapped into in his election campaign and during his (endlessly scandal-ridden) presidency?

If there is indeed a new antagonism against which liberal democracies can now defines themselves—one which forces democracy itself into a position of fundamental importance—then NATO can be understood as an authentic defensive alliance. It would be one necessary and well-justified given this new Sino-Russian antagonism, the new democracy-autocracy fault line quickly and openly forming on the international stage. If neoliberalism (what Beckley called the "old order") has effectively come to an end with these new circumstances, and there is an authentic dispute between competing values, then we may ditch the politics of suspicion (and the endless subtleties of academic criticism, American declinist narratives, etc.—the staple of the academic hard Left, followed in recent times by even more right-wing commentators).

After cynicism, after the politics of suspicion, what is left? What is left is the practical necessity of having to choose—to choose between the actual options on the table: the democratic alliances, or the autocrat's paradise. Present circumstances finally requires one to hazard a belief in something, an informed and one might dare say "enlightened" belief in an alliance that has the best chance to continue to be a bastion of freedom and self-determination, and the rule of law. On the world stage, we make this binary choice in favor of the morally superior of the options: liberal democracy. At home, we continue our struggle to achieve more fully and more perfectly in practice what (on the world stage, in diplomacy) we preach in theory for all.

Shall we, then, risk to be filled with the passion of conviction that our democratic option, open to all, where all can live together with all, might be made better?

Putin’s Grievances, Putin’s War—What Not To Say Should Be Said

The harvest is reaped nearest the fields: the innovations of the industrial era, being an outgrowth of the Scientific Revolution, developed first in and around where that Revolution occurred: on the European continent. Certain epistemological conditions of course were necessary for the discovery and development of both science and scientific technologies–and those conditions are the provenance of many different cultures, from many different continents across the globe. In truth, it took more than just Europe to get to the Scientific Revolution. But science and technology as we know it were born in Europe, and in that sense both bear the marks of a particular (perhaps even peculiar) civilization–with its causal-mechanical, materialist way of analyzing the world (by no means a conceptual architecture necessary to science itself–but that’s another story). Because of the (by now) obvious and profound advantages such developments afford humanity, science and scientific technologies quickly spread outward beyond Europe, so that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are few places on the Earth not in some way structured or influenced by them.

Soon after the rise of science and the development of scientific technologies, the world began a process of “development”. But this process follows the principle with which this essay opens: it begins closest to the point of origin of science and scientific technology: first in Europe; then the Americas; then elsewhere to different degrees, and at different speeds. The result: an unequal spatial distribution of “developed” societies: societies employing the productive fruits of innovations in science and technology. If sophistication of scientific and technological development tracks the maturity or age of societies, then this spatial disparity implies a temporal one as well. It is some sense of a temporal developmental disparity between societies that gives rise, therefore, to a sense (rightly or wrongly) of the relative “backwardness” of a given society–a view we might wish to contest on moral or spiritual grounds.

That Europe was the first to develop scientifically and technologically forms the basis for the major antagonism that underlies the supposed “clash of civilizations” we see on the world stage from time-to-time. We see it right now, operating behind the rhetoric of justification for Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. In fact, this is not a “clash of civilizations” as Putin would like the world to believe. The divide between “the West” and Russia, rather, reflects a contingent disparity in relative degrees of scientific and technical sophistication that led to more obvious disparities in economic fundamentals. The clash is between different orders of “development”, even different developmental priorities.

While a sense of moral superiority (rightly or wrongly) may accompany the economic disparities created by relative differences in scientific or technical mastery, we cannot ignore the sociopolitical (and even psychological) significance of this disparity itself. It has real effects. It is significant in shaping diplomatic relations between the major world economic powers, and the relations between the world's military (nuclear) powers–which two diplomatic theaters are most definitely not the same: economic power does not necessarily track military power.

We most especially cannot ignore these disparities with respect to Russia-Europe and Russia-U.S. relations today. Indeed, the longstanding and by now historically overdetermined economic disparities between Russia and “The West”, deriving as they do from more fundamental contingent historical differences in the development of science and technology in Western as opposed to Russian nations, has led to diplomatic chauvinism on the part of the arrogant political-economic agenda-setting of the Western powers, and a resulting deep resentment over the fact of that Western assertion of power. We have a classic case of what Nietzsche, in a different context, calls ressentiment. With the imbalances (both economic and political) that exist between the nuclear powers involved in the Ukraine crisis, this situation is dangerous.

We should be aware of this dimension of ressentiment and how it affects the international relations between scientifically, technologically and economically imbalanced nations. Since greater scientific and technical mastery in a society typically produces greater economic strength (higher productivity), economic disparities among nations threaten to induce feelings of inferiority. Diplomatic condescension is, then, a problem–one of the enduring problems in international relations.

We can certainly find this attitude predominant among the British during the nineteenth century as they colonized their way into world economic and military supremacy. A similar thing can be said about the Americans throughout the twentieth century (and even before). For sociocultural reasons having to do with the emergence of a deepening critical self-awareness of the wrongs of colonialism, imperialism, and unfettered capitalism, this European and American arrogant self-confidence was chastened. But this history of diplomatic geopolitical condescension is hard to shake, and is doubtless even harder to lose when dealing with those whose societies had to suffer it. Thus we can still find this problem tainting European and American international politics today. “The West”, then, as concept is both a cipher for ressentiment, when articulated by self-described “non-Westerns”, and the site of (quite justifiable, in my view) contestable political, social, cultural and moral values. Just what about so-called “Western values” is contestable, and for what reasons, we shall consider momentarily.

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The fact remains that “Western” political-economic arrangements, from North America to Singapore are, despite their (often profound, and possibly fatal) flaws, more economically productive than any of the serious alternatives which attempted to challenge this hegemony. Since the post-war period, however, which began in earnest in the late 1940s, the economic consensus of Western nations (capitalism with regional variations) has been joined to a social and political one: liberal democracy. This, though, was not a trend adopted by all who joined the economic side of this consensus; indeed, many non-Western nations that adopted the capitalist model rejected (or failed to create and maintain) the Western political consensus (liberal democracy). Some, like China, have even adapted the economic side to fit within a larger political-economic vision that was even intended to oppose the Western economic system.

Putin wants to oppose “The West” but it is clear that what really ails him is the political consensus of the post-war era fundamental to American and European international relations: Putin means to reject liberal democracy as the sociopolitical framework for free market (so-called) capitalism. But the difficulty he and the Russian Federation faces is that there is no economic power to sustain that opposition, or to challenge the predominance of the “Western” sociopolitical consensus he finds so onerous. As has been the case for quite some time–whether we are talking about the Soviet Union or the Czarist Empire of yesteryear–the Russian economy is underdeveloped and underutilized, despite there being valuable and plentiful natural resources. Thus Putin finds himself in the dangerous position of trying to decouple the economic from the political consensus Europe had designed following WWII by projecting military power alone–yet another common theme of much Russian history. Rather than pursue a diplomatic path of economic cooperation and possible integration with the rest of Europe to its West (something signaled by Gorbachev during perestroika, and uneasily pursued by Yeltsin, but met with limited success), or rather than play the longer game of serious domestic economic development in concert with the big economic players, only angling for your own sociopolitical agenda when the economic fundamentals could back it up (the China strategy), Putin instead wants his economic cake and to eat it too–at a shot-gun wedding. In a series of aggressive moves on neighboring countries, beginning in 2008 with the invasion of Georgia (although we might start the clock with the Chechan conflict years earlier during the Yeltsin administration), culminating recently this February with the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Putin has switched to gunboat diplomacy. Overnight, Europe was beset with a military conflagration not seen in many decades, and drawn back into bellicose territorial wrangling (complete with nostalgia for the Old Days) Europe thought it had put to rest with the last of the fallen from World War Two.

Why? Why Putin’s arguably gradual shift to gunboat diplomacy–which, given the unprecedented sanctions levied by European, American and some Asian countries, looks like it will spell certain doom for the whole of the (already fragile) Russian economy? What are Putin’s reasons?

Despite the widespread speculation that Putin may have had a mental lapse of some kind, possibly brought about by the two years of pandemic-related restrictions the nations of the world imposed upon themselves, we must charitably assume the opposite: that there are actual reasons for what Putin is doing, as absurdly immoral as they may appear to much of the global community. Before we condemn Putin, we must know what his reasons are, and condemn those.

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Simply put, as Angela Stent (2018) has recently pointed out: Putin is a Eurasianist. Eurasianism is a deeply conservative ideology, steeped in fascism. Indeed, Putin’s version is derived in part from Russian fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who, like Eurasianists generally, repudiated communism and the Bolsheviks, stressed the uniqueness of Russian civilization, and dreamt of the creation of a “conservative utopia”–one certainly devoid of “Western values” (Stent 2018, 33). Eurasianists did agree with their communist opponents like Stalin on one key point, however: “that Russia had a unique destiny that set it apart from the West and legitimized its right to rule over large swaths of adjacent territory” (ibid.). It would seem that we are seeing this philosophy of conquest on display right now, as Putin continues his invasion of Ukraine. But Putin’s current war with Ukraine is not simply a function of his version of Russian fascism; it is perhaps more immediately motivated by his worries over NATO and/or EU membership for Ukraine–and both are seen by many top Russian officials as a kind of existential threat to the security of the Russian Federation as a whole. This only raises an obvious question to which we believe there is an obvious answer: why is Putin and many of Russia’s political leaders so worried about Ukraine’s potential EU or NATO membership?

Part of the worry about Ukraine’s membership in the EU has to do with identity: many Russians consider Ukraine a kind of place of national and ethnic origin. And there is a history to be told that justifies this view, as a matter of historical fact. But this augment from origins belies an even deeper antagonism between Russian “civilization” and the European world: it is also an historical fact that ethnic Russians have always been uneasy or ambivalent about their connections to the European world–to French or German culture, for example (two of the most important European reference points for Russians). Why? It would be difficult to articulate the reasons for this antagonism in an essay such as this, because we are really dealing with an archeological geography of cultural and conceptual differences. Yet that’s precisely the intellectual and moral trap we should right now avoid at all costs: these historical-cultural differences only describe that there are certain antagonisms–they do not and cannot establish that there must be such antagonisms between Russian and European “civilization”. We must be absolutely clear here: no amount of historical or cultural differences, no matter how well-established they are in the history of Russia, could possibly justify (morally speaking) Putin’s gunboat diplomacy, or his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps, then, there is more to be said for Putin’s reasons beyond the (very old) trope of ongoing European/Russian “civilizational differences”?

Perhaps we can drop the fascist philosophy, and those differences in culture and mentality (or whatever) for a moment, and focus on the territorial issue itself: Is there even a Ukraine as such, Putin wondered recently? After all, Ukraine, like every nation-state, had its boundaries created by some social or political process, and we can rightly ask: was it justified? Legitimate? According to Putin, it most certainly was not. What’s his view, though?

It has something to do with Soviet beneficence in a moment of weakness, and pre-Soviet collapse concessions–and Ukraine’s sudden declaration of independence just as the U.S.S.R. was crumbling. This latter point is the most important issue often missed in discussions of Ukraine’s territorial legitimacy. Putin, for various philosophical, historical and political reasons, might not be able to grant Ukraine territorial legitimacy, but the historical fact remains that Ukraine declared its own independence from the Soviet Union–with whatever territorial extent had been established for Ukrainans during the Soviet era. In other words, the argument should not be about whether Ukraine has a legitimate territorial extent or not, or whether they have a “right” to exist; they themselves, by an overwhelming majority decision using their own local political mechanisms, declared their own independent existence with the territory given them by the Soviet regime. What about the Donbas, a disputed territory–many of whose residents desire union with the Russian Federation? Or the Crimea, yet another region where one finds many who identify with Russia and as Russian? The response here is simple, and should be obvious: that’s an internal matter that needs to be settled by the mechanisms of democracy internal to Ukraine itself–not unilaterally by Putin or by the Russian Federation alone.

In other words, once again, the real issue here has to do with sovereignty, and the territorial integrity that goes along with it. Every other philosophical, historical, cultural, social and political consideration is superseded by this fact of self-declared and self-determined independence for Ukraine–something the Ukrainans decided for themselves decades ago. What explains Putin’s beef with “Western powers”, then, has nothing to do with what real (or even sometimes imagined and exaggerated) differences there are between Russian and European or American peoples. What explains Putin’s war of aggression is quite simply that he doesn’t like not being able to do whatever the f**k he wants, based on whatever (distorted and self-serving) philosophical, historical or political theory he wishes to adopt. To make this an issue of “East v. West” or a “clash of civilizations”, or (as is increasingly common in some elite intellectual circles) to use the “West’s” response to the conflict as a chance to rehearse the moral, political and humanitarian failures and/or hypocrisy of “The West” … is, quite simply, stupid.

But stupid there is, and we have seen it come out in full force among many on the academic Left–as if somehow we in “the West” must apologize and supply justification for the mere fact of our calling Putin, and the actions of the Russian military elites, evil or immoral.

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In response to Putin’s aggression, there is almost universal condemnation: a majority of U.N. member nations, in a special general assembly, denounced Putin’s actions as not only illegal under international law, but immoral. Predictably, American and European academic and educated elites started asking: But can the West take and maintain the moral high ground here? Can it without pause be taken seriously in its denunciation of Putin and the Putin regime? Is the West justified in calling out Putin and the Putin regime as wrong, morally culpable—even evil–when even in the recent past, many Western nations have been guilty of equivalent acts of brutality or barbarity?

I think that it can. And we shouldn’t have to apologize for that stance either, nor should we dither on about the many moral failings of “The West” as this conflict unfolds in unpredictable ways. We may even be justified in taking an even more aggressive stance towards Putin and the Putin regime, as former NATO general Sir Richard Shirreff has long argued. What exactly is the criticism coming from the Western academic left, the intellectual elites manning various humanities departments in the U.S. and throughout Europe? I would like to argue that much of it is stupid (which I do, in part, here).

Complaining that the U.S. is in no position to take the moral high ground on account of its own past foreign policy wrongs; that Putin “has a point” in worrying about Russia’s security; etc.: While I completely agree that the US is a nation of foreign and domestic policy blunders, and of persistent moral failings and failures—even lethal ones—that doesn’t for a moment imply that we should remain quiet and uninvolved, or that we should not voice unapologetic support for basic but fundamental principles of a free world. We need to be clear who and what is wrong here, and what principles (despite not being put properly into practice) we are for. That said, I would try to be as cautious as possible in finding an answer to Putin and his unjustified and unjustifiable war of aggression. Even if the US has blood on its hands for its many senseless and useless wars, that’s not a reason not to speak out and defend what is right….

Exiting Asymmetric War: Post-Cynical Democracy

Among the many insights Hegel had into the human psyche was the concept of negative identity. World War II was the catalyst for negative identity the world over. Allies came to define themselves against Nazi aggression, and eventually against Japanese fascist imperialism. But identity is more complex, of course. Those same Allies would diverge in terms of what they defined themselves as, positively. Following the end of WWII, there was an identity crisis. It was quickly remedied by the Cold War: European and American powers defined themselves against the quickly strengthening Soviet Union, soon armed with nuclear weapons, and its Communist ideology. Stalin would prove to be as murderous as Hitler and the Nazis had been, if not far worse: gulags, purgings, preventable famines, and state-engineered machinery for domestic fear and terror—all this in the years and decades following the end of the war. In 1989, this negative identity would come to an end, with no clear adversary in sight to restore the need. In quick succession East Germany comes apart at the seems overnight with no response from Moscow. Putin, stationed as a low-ranking counterintelligence agent in Dresden would call for backup as the protesters set their sights on his KGB building; “Moscow is silent” would be the reply from the desk officer. By 1991 there was no Soviet Union. The American psyche, consciously celebrating the downfall, suffered a shock to its unconscious. That shock would come to define the US, as it found itself virtually unchallenged as world hegemon.

The post-Soviet era would mark a new “post-modern” reality of unchallenged American hegemony, now riding high on the “end of history”—yet another Hegelian theme that found (strained) usefulness in attempts to explain the rapid succession of events between 1989 and 1991. In attempting to “contain” the Soviet Empire, however, European and American powers would find themselves fighting increasingly asymmetric wars quickly degenerating into regional quagmires. Not able to openly confront Soviet power on a hot battlefield for fear of rapid escalation to nuclear war—and therefore global catastrophe—the West and the USSR had to fight by proxy, with European or American forces engaging in direct hot conflict with lesser regional powers backed by the Soviets, in order to gain strategic advantage.

After a series of mostly failed attempts to check Soviet strategic advance by armed military interventions, with Vietnam being the signal moment, these direct hot tactics would effectively ramify, in these heady years of newfound American-led “Western” hegemony, into a new doctrine of war—a kind of “post-modern” war strategy, driven by a new political and economic consensus among Western powers that would in time come to be called “neoliberalism”. The post-modern neoliberal doctrine of warfare was now primarily driven by the attempt to negate by forcible political-economic means what could not be done directly by pure military means (invasion and regime change). Thus this warfare was conducted through what Naomi Klein accurately described as a “shock doctrine”: create or promote the conditions of immediate political and economic crisis through subterfuge (perhaps supporting a military coup or junta, as the CIA infamously did in Chile), then move in with the economic shock team ready to institute the essential architecture of the neoliberal order: “free markets” and so on. We may call this “post-ideological” warfare by other means. But of course since the “ideology”, like the water of a fish’s environment, was everywhere—after all capitalism has “no alternative”, as Thatcher would famously remark—this was ideology at its purest.

This strategy would, however, lead to increasingly more bitter disappointment and open rage among states first supported by the West but which ended up (for predictable reasons) failing. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s and 90s, Iran and the Middle East would become the high-watermarks of failed Western neoliberal interventionism, with much of the blood on American hands. But with the 9/11 attacks on US soil, this post-modern strategy would take on new and more troubling dimensions. It would become both more openly vicious and yet more nebulous a form of conflict. Indeed, it would switch targets from a relatively well-defined ideological aggressor (communism), with a clear power-center, to an ill-defined, diffuse opponent: “terror”. It had now become even more purely ideological, a kind of twisted idealism absurdly defining itself against a concept. The “War on Terror” would be the new ideological background to a neoliberal political-economic strategy that would quickly find itself out to sea, having lost its original motivation. Indeed, the “War on Terror”, being such a diffuse concept to begin with, soon becomes a cypher for all manner of islamophobia or outright racism, further exacerbating an already tragic story. By the second decade of the 21st century, this bellicose neoliberal strategy seemed tired, even outmoded, as Russia and China emerged as serious military or economic rivals to the Western US-led alliance, demonstrating quite clearly that the marriage between capitalism and democracy needn't be so secure (not especially as secure as the once-fringe neoliberal apologists, like Milton Freedman, had long argued).

The return to clearly-defined ideological dividing lines, so characteristic of the “modernity” of the war years, was inaugurated by the most nostalgic of the West’s challengers: Vladimir Putin. The 2007 speech delivered by an indignant Putin to the Munich Security Conference marks the beginning of the end of the “post-ideological” age of untrammeled, US-led neoliberal “shock” tactics “spreading democracy and freedom around the world”. In that post-modern age of the “end of history”, the rhetoric of democracy and freedom surrounding the political, economic and moral realities of this interventionist neoliberal shock therapy could only be met with (justifiable) cynicism. But the danger we now face is failing to drop the cynicism in response to rapidly changing ideological circumstances: we are now fast moving back(ward) into the old world of symmetric conflict among nuclear-armed powers, with suddenly very sharply defined—and I would argue authentic—ideological differences between them. The nebulous era of post-modern cynicism, with its endless (albeit well-motivated) critiques of neoliberalism from the academic Left, is now no longer tenable. We are back in a very “modern”—and unfortunately all-too-familiar—world.

Indeed, it is perhaps the most profound of ironies (and an overdetermined one, to be sure) that a figure such as Putin, steeped as he is in late-nineteenth century Russian fascist social philosophy, would be the political figure to usher us back into the world we thought we had left behind at the falling of the Berlin Wall. It is a very Nietzschean moment, when Nietzsche was at his metaphysical best: we are seeing a repetition with a difference. Or perhaps we are witness once again to (and here we pile irony on top of irony) Marx’s famous quip about what Hegel missed in his speculative theory of history: it repeats itself indeed, but first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce now is that modernity is here once again, and our negative identities are coming back to us like they never left us. But like during World War II, we now cannot afford or risk moral or philosophical cynicism regarding “The West” and its once hollow-seeming rhetoric of democracy and freedom. At the level of the new and emerging political realities, that ideology of “democracy and freedom”, which was once convenient cover for the covert operations of neoliberal tacticians and their war by other means (a fact that is key to the ongoing hostility and bitterness towards “The West”), is now deadly serious. There are now profoundly consequential political-ideological dividing lines to fight for as the world seems to want to shift to the autocratic right. These lines in democracy’s favor are now being actively fought for by the Ukrainians on a very hot early Spring battlefield.

“Democracy” and “Freedom” are, then, suddenly very meaningful; they can now justifiably be detached from that cynicism which only hears the cries of the hypocrite as “Western” powers voice their concerns over the war in Ukraine. They are suddenly very real concepts, with real implications in terms of the fascist autocracy being opposed by the European and American alliance. This alliance is backed by most nations of the world, it should be noted, as demonstrated by the numerous resolutions issued by the UN—a (much-maligned) institution that, in precisely this specific moment in history, takes on an immensely powerful functional and importantly symbolic role. Usually cause for a cynicism towards the UN, the symbolism is here key as its condemnatory resolutions against Putin's Russia establishes that this opposition is not a merely “Western” affair ... as if the many nations of Africa do not look over and see themselves in the Ukraine. The African response, delivered in the earliest of emergency UN sessions, is quite telling: while (rightly) chastising “Western” powers for their hypocrisy vis a vie their own vaunted principles of “freedom” and “democracy”, many African nations nonetheless stood united with Europe and the US in their opposition to Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression. Democracy and Freedom are the unifying principles, even though its most vocal defendants are some of its most morally shameful claimants.

The subtleties of academic criticism, with its (perhaps justifiable) moralism directed against American hegemony, or the sincere effort to balance vociferous Russian condemnation with an objective evaluation of its “very real security concerns” over Nato’s hugging of Russia's western borders, are simply no longer tenable, for Putin’s jig is up, and the bluff is being called: “security concerns” and the like are Putin’s own ideological cover for something much more sinister, as outlined in the now-infamous “Ukraine” essay Putin issued in the summer of 2021. In classic, modernist fascist style, Putin paints the picture of his ideological struggle, his Mein Kampf moment: Ukraine is a fake country given up by the soft-hearted Khrushchev (himself of Ukrainian descent), a deal finally (and hastily) sealed by Yeltsin during the chaotic breakup of the Soviet Union. In short, Ukraine should have never existed in the first place; it is the homeland and origin of all Russian peoples everywhere. It is Russian. It is Russia. And we are Ukraine’s liberators, from its neo-Nazi fascist nationalist defenders. In other words, have we not a repeat with (a hyper-fake social media propaganda engine of) a difference? Hitler’s early move on Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), then on to Poland and beyond? We must beware the liberal-leftist tendency to be blinded by its own ideology: that of progress, which would reject the (more ironically conservative) Nietzschean principle of repetition with a difference ... more of the same, with some change thrown in for comedy’s sake (as Marx would realize). If we are to love our fate, then we must be able to love it even while that fate laughs in our face, chastening us of our stupid “progressive” dreams. The old non-progressive world is still with us, lurking in the shadows of our triumphalist progressivism.

We must rise to the challenge, and be strong (and humble) enough to meet fascist “strength” with the strength of our own ideology of democracy and freedom: the freedom to be left alone to democratically determine the conduct of our own affairs—something that, against fascist autocracy, actually means something, something which cuts through any lingering cynicism. Can we not see the hollowness of Putin’s “security concerns” just when we can see the hollowness of our own commitment to “freedom” and “democracy” mouthed in the face of the uncomfortable fact of neoliberal shock tactics? Putin's war gives us the negative identity freedom and democracy itself needs: we—European, African, American, Asian people the world over who have thus voted in the majority—don’t want the oligarchic, mafia-style state that is de rigueur in Russia today. Ukraine, as many former soviet republics were, was headed down that road, to which the Ukrainian people voted “no!”. We say “no!” to Putin’s Russia, and ask that Russia itself be liberated from the iron grip of Putin’s fascist autocracy.

If it’s not possible to be (without cynicism) for democracy, then let’s at least be against fascist autocracy. We in the “West” can worry over our sorry neoliberal state once the war is over, and we can resume our quiet lives of (first-world) desperation.

The only question is: what will the free world do the day after the victory party is over?