GUEST EDITORIAL - CONSERVATION OF ENEMIES

Those of you who have my books may have noticed the Foreword in “Frozen Chosen” and the several back cover blurbs by Colonel Lawrence D. Wilkerson. He’s a good friend of mine, a fact of which I am most proud, since he’s a very interesting guy.

He’s asked me to put up the op-ed that follows. I think you’ll all find it thought-provoking and agree with it. Those of you who have Substacks of your own are encouraed to Cross-Post this; those of you with FB pages are free to post there. The goal is to make this “go viral.”

Without further ado:

CONSERVATION OF ENEMIES

by Lawrence Wilkerson*

In his book “The Relations of Nations,” Frederick Hartmann deals with a principle of those relations he labels "conservation of enemies". The principle is quite straightforward: a prudent nation should have no more enemies than it can manage at one time. The U.S. would do itself tremendous good were it to adhere to this principle for the U.S. has far too many enemies presently. Deepening the danger considerably, some of them are nuclear weapons states.

A cursory look at the list is, frankly, astonishing: China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, various African states from Mali to Somalia, the Houthis in Yemen, various terrorist groups from ISIS to al-Qa'ida to Abu Sayyef, and arguably even certain ostensible "allies" such as Saudi Arabia. This is not to mention that "Russia", for example, actually includes the members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Moscow-led counterpart to NATO. Nor does our list include the now more than nascent axis developing between Beijing and Moscow. Together their power would be awesome.

These top two enemies alone, Russia and China, account for 1.5 billion people, and just considering the others who could mount significant opposition if decided upon, there are over 2 billion -- or roughly a quarter of the global population. Moreover, worldwide polls consistently demonstrate that a far higher percentage of the world's peoples, particularly those under 35, believe the U.S. to be the greatest threat to their futures. There is little doubt too that some of this angst and concern is due to the ever-present fact that more than a third of the world labors directly or indirectly under some sort of imperial sanctions levied upon them by America.

In a presentation I gave in 2014 at Canada's Center for International Government Innovation (CIGI) entitled "The Travails of Empire"

one can find a description of some of the more deleterious aspects of such imperial overreach. Here, I want to treat only three aspects -- nuclear weapons states, general dissipation of power, and what I will call "serious diversion".

Russia's nuclear weapons stockpile includes approximately 6,000 warheads, roughly matched by the U.S. stockpile. China's stockpile, because of Mao Tse Tung's original strategy of having only sufficient numbers to deter others who possess the weapons, is approximately 200-400 warheads. This last must come with the serious caveat that due to Moscow's and Washington's recent actions, China's leadership is seriously considering mounting a drive to build far more weapons in order to gain the capacity to ride out a first strike and retaliate. Such a decision has probably already been made. To be honest, no one knows the true size of the DPRK's stockpile, but an educated guess would put it between 20 and 50.

This represents a truly disappointing policy failure on the part of Washington. In 1992-93, when I was Special Assistant to Colin Powell, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, we were busily dismantling the Former Soviet Union's weapons and cutting back commensurately on our own. Even as late as 2002-03, when I was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Powell, we had concluded the Moscow Treaty with Putin's Russia and both countries promised to cut at least to a range of 1200-2200, far less dangerous numbers than today but still enough to end human existence on the planet. Quite obviously too, Beijing would not be adding such great expense to its defense establishment were it not for recent Russian and American actions.

This failure of policy is unreckoned by most Americans but will likely go down as one of the greatest failures of American diplomacy ever. It most assuredly will if we wind up using these weapons -- but, alas, there will be no one to calculate accountability or assess blame.

Such a colossal policy failure is deepened significantly by the accompanying American failure of willingly and forthrightly discarding all nuclear weapons arms control measures developed during the Cold War -- the anti-ballistic missile treaty (ABM) abrogated by G.W. Bush's administration in order to build ballistic missile defenses (BMD); the intermediate nuclear force treaty (INF); the Open Skies Treaty; the conventional forces in Europe (CFE) treaty; and now almost certainly given the Ukraine War, New START, the last vestige of strategic nuclear weapons arms control. Motivations for discarding such arms control measures are quite clear: to build more and more capable weapons; to enrich the nuclear weapons complex, a niche but very wealthy element of the larger military-industrial complex; and to initiate and sustain a new cold war. Proffered reasons, such as those contained in various nuclear weapons posture reviews -- enemy actions, modernization, securitization, and nuclear surety of existing stockpiles -- are preposterous when set against the existential danger of such actions.

The momentum toward even more nuclear weapons states is also very dangerous -- and as pronounced as in the past when diplomatic actions were somewhat frantic to arrest such momentum with several states, from Brazil and South Africa to South Korea (ROK) and Iraq. Today, other than the over-zealous actions of both Jerusalem and Washington via-a-vis Iran, there is almost no attention paid to other aspirant states such as Saudi Arabia, South Korea again, and even encouragement in some parts of the U.S. Government to Japan.

We are at a moment that might be assessed as equally dangerous, with regard to the actual use of nuclear weapons, as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Ukraine is only one scenario vivifying this danger; the almost total absence of arms control treaties is another -- if too esoteric to most Americans -- catalyst.

Not conserving one's enemies also dissipates state power across a range of critical capabilities, particularly when the most often turned-to of those capabilities, as well as the best-funded -- the military instrument -- is under unprecedented stress.

Not only has the Empire's so-called All-Volunteer Military not won but one war since its inception -- and it has fought several rather badly -- it is today slowly falling apart. The Army, for instance, fell so far short (almost 30,000 recruits) last year in recruiting that now it must suffer an overall endstrength decrement. The Navy is hurting almost as badly as it raises its maximum age to enlist to 41, offers tens of thousands of dollars to enlist, and must hot-bunk its ships to make deployments. The Air Force is critically short in aviators in some of its most critical flight positions. The Marine Corps is the only Service not hurting rather badly, having cultivated its mystique to the point that the few young Americans who do have a propensity to volunteer for military service (less than 9% of those eligible in the most recent poll), prefer that Service.

More critically, the dollars that the Congress throws at the military -- even at times in excess of its expressed requirements -- are dollars that are wasted in terms of other critical and pressing needs. These needs include those of the diplomatic instrument of national power which go begging in comparison to the military. Other needs are more prosaic -- healthcare, infrastructure, education, and housing to mention perhaps the most pressing. With so many enemies -- and so much enmity -- in the world, members of Congress nonetheless keep feeding the military budget and national security in general. Time to pare the enemies list somewhat perhaps? But that is the mission of the diplomatic instrument and it is starved, for people and for dollars.

What I call "serious diversion" is perhaps the most critical aspect of our failure to curb our list of enemies and, as importantly, reduce some of the enmity in the world caused by wholesale sanctions and constant use of the military as much as anything else. That which we are diverted from, existential like nuclear weapons only with near-fixed certainty, is the crisis of the climate.

Ukraine is the most glaring example of how this works today. The western media is full of war news; whereas one must search and search for reporting on the climate crisis. When one does find a tidbit here and there it is usually uninformed, even trivial and treated as such, or widely off the mark in context. Wind farms are contested here, solar arrays there; flooding is awesome but not really related; Tesla electric cars are neat but Elon Musk isn't; Exxon Mobil has lied for decades about the results of its fossil fuel research and gas at the pumps, at record highs, is going down; Saudi Arabia is still pumping out fossil fuels -- as is the Permian Basin in Texas -- but not as much as we would prefer; and sea rise -- well, there is still some stellar seashore property in Florida we should try to acquire before it's all gobbled up.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report on February 28 of last year -- four days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- and even though both the Ukrainian and Russian head-of-delegation to that Panel condemned the invasion as a diversion from the real world crisis, few listened. Even fewer in the media perused the Technical Section of that Report to find that we are likely headed for a global rise in temperature that is unsustainable, i.e., it is likely humans cannot continue to exist with such a rise.

We -- the U.S. -- have failed to conserve our enemies. We are not a prudent state. We are an imprudent Empire. Admittedly, many if not all of our enemies are in some form cowed by our present power, even the top two Russia and China. You can hear it from time to time in the voices of their foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Wang Yi respectively -- both of whom I have met and consider prudent men and superb diplomatists. But superb diplomatists without equally superb diplomatists to deal with in the Empire, are at a loss -- a deadly deficit, to be sure.

America needs to change this situation, and swiftly. And we must change it primarily with talking, not with bombs, bullets, bayonets, and banking.

*Lawrence Wilkerson is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute. He was assistant to the late-General Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his chief of staff when he was Secretary of State.

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