Americans can stop the mad rush to war and refuse its logic

The most likely war will be the one that no one at the time, or almost no one, on either side, including none of their intellectuals, is able, when thinking as clearly and as rigorously as possible, to avoid affirming in terms of the justice and necessity of their own country's engaging in it.

Or course, opponents of their government's war will tend to be falsely accused of siding with the foreign government their own opposes. Some will do so, foolishly. But national repressions like wars usual are stupid in how they target people. As for the foolishness, it is visible enough. I wish there were less of it (and not that all the fools were jailed -- they would jail, torture, kill, or otherwise harass or try to silence, frustrate, or stop, a lot of people doing very creative and good work in the name of targeting their own enemies as they choose to imagine them.

Foolishness on the left: For example (there are others), the left does not want Iran to defeat Israel in a war nor to be defeated by it; the Iranian left dislikes their own government as oppressive, but well knows an American war will not help them but make everything worse, as it so often does. I also think the people of Gaza have a lousy government, and people in other countries have a legitimate quarrel with it. The pursuit of this quarrel through military means has helped no one. It has harmed the people on both sides. The United States could, and should, try to end it. American Jews and others should join in taking the lead to call for its end, as many are doing. They rightly assert that there is nothing inconsistent about this position. Asserting and articulating this position is difficult and takes courage. Wanting to win a war is easier to feel, "think" (or believe), and do.

Courage and greatness will belong to the few who can find a way to resist the rush to war, which may soon embroil the United States directly and fully. The US government has funded the Israeli side in this war, but it is also animated by contrary dispositions as it would also prefer to preserve its own "national" economic, political, and ideological interests without war, and its better leaders would end, avoid, or limit it as best they could. They should be encouraged by popular demand that they do so.

A US-led political order is still the world's most powerful force, and, as in the Cold War, there are forces that oppose it, only without proposing, nor seemingly being able to, anything clearly better. Nothing would be easier than for Russian or Chinese intellectuals, or Iranian and Arab nationalist ones, to draw up a bill of complaints about what is wrong with the American-led capitalist order. Thatcher was right in a way that the smarter people on the left do recognize, that "there is no alternative." There is no spatial alternative, and the idea only means war. There "is" only a temporal alternative, which lies in the divine promise that the "good" that "is" is what will be. The alternative to American capitalism will only be a post-capitalism that develops out of and within it, including by internally antagonistic democratic forces. If the US goes to war against Iran, or Russia (and it is now in a proxy war against both countries), or China, or any other world power, who in America would argue that these opposing national governments are right? The opposition will be to the war itself.

In Europe in 1914 and the lead up to that war, most German intellectuals (including Jewish ones) shared the conviction of most French intellectuals that in a possible conflict between these two countries, much, maybe most, of what they valued and cared about would be at stake.

The idea of a conflict of civilizations is easy to think and understand. It's not hard for Russian intellectuals, or Jewish ones, or American ones, or others, to come up with reasons why their national "civilization" is a repository of some great values that the nations to which they are opposed tend to miss. But (a) any of these supposedly unique culturally "greatnesses" may conceal or allow barbarism, stupidity, and the descent into destruction, including internally. There were great things about German culture; the Nazis did much to destroy them. You can destroy by trying to preserve. (b) These discourses are ideological, and conceal naked power interests. (c) The war against the enemy will probably end by making your country more like them. (d) This division of the world is fatally and monstrously exaggerated. The world's culture is increasing international.

The United States could stand for a solution to this conflict. Of course its own involvement tends to undermines such efforts, though it does not make them impossible. It is easy to get the impression that most activists and public voices merely favor one side or other in the war. It is easy for people to think of this conflict as resembling WW2. Or does it more resemble WW1? Then the major social force not wanting the war was the internationalist socialists. Their later achievements were both internally betrayed and widely discredited in the subsequent history. But internationalism is certainly not dead, whether or not socialism is. The United States, sometimes operating through regional allies, has a history of pretending to solve problems, using military force, and in the process making them worse. The Cold War was not ended by the American show of force, it was ended through a long struggle of dissident citizens, workers, artists and intellectuals who opposed "Communism" sometimes in the name of the values it refused, sometimes in the name of those it lay claim to. This is one reason I have hope for Israel/Palestine: perhaps years from now, in a time that is not one of war, enough people there, including Israeli Jews, and Americans, Jewish and not, will have found an effective way to say: we do not want to live in an Apartheid state and continue to be our neighbors' enemies and jailers. The conditions for this to happen do not appear to exist in Israel at the moment, understandably. They do exist in the United States. Regimes identify themselves with their people. But their claims can weaken, dissolve, and end. We must sustain and pursue this dream.