Hard-a-Starboard!

THE PEACE ADVOCATE AUGUST 2024

Image: Sujalparab, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

By Hoffmann the Organizer

Readers have been responding to my grim articles on war and climate with demands of “What would you do, then, Captain Bummer”?  A fair question and one deserving a robust answer.

First a recap of our story so far.  Yes, we are deep in a new Cold War, with all the bloody proxy conflicts and looming nuclear threat of the first one.  Yes, we just had four straight days of the hottest worldwide temperatures – in the past 100,000 years according to paleoclimate researchers – and that is likely pushing us past the tipping point soon after 2030 (Washington Post, 7/27/24).  And while we sit and wonder, like the frog in the pot of heating water, when we’re going to address that imminent climate threat, we may get hit much harder by the escalation of the new Cold War.  

The logic of conflict with Russia at this point is to fight until Ukraine can get back most of the territories already lost.  As George Beebe of the Quincy Institute has noted, that would require gaining the upper hand over Russia on the battlefield, which means, he goes on, “We’re going to be in for a very sobering, and, I think, tragic outcome.”  Really there are two possible “tragic outcomes” of our strategy: either we fail, leaving the situation the same or worse but with many additional Ukrainian (and Russian) casualties; or we succeed, and Russia feels existentially threatened enough to unleash a nuclear defense.  

“Hard-a-starboard!” I hear the Captain roar.  Odysseus can have his Scylla and Charybdis, the Titanic, its iceberg; I want the open sea!  

The way to safer waters is as simple and age-old as civilization: we need peace and cooperation among the great (now nuclear) powers.  Yes, folks, that means peace and cooperation with Russia and China.

All the doubts about that route are based on hypotheses assumed a priori to be irrefutable: Putin cannot be trusted to negotiate; China wants to conquer Taiwan: Russia wants to conquer all of Ukraine, then all of Europe; negotiations are Chamberlain-style appeasement; Xi and Putin only understand force.

None of these hypotheses appear so sure under analysis, but even if they were possibly true, we do not have the luxury to continue to act on them as we currently are for one simple reason: we will be the victims of our own resolve in the end, whether it is all-out war or the end of a human-sustaining environment.

That’s why we need to act on other equally possible hypotheses.  That everyone has an interest in walking back these military conflicts and turning our full attention to the climate crisis; that everyone (including us) has their price and can be bought off; that nations respond to positive gestures as readily as hostile ones.  And for you history buffs: “appeasement” had a much smaller role in causing World War II than the brutal terms of the Versailles Treaty, the human suffering of the Great Depression, or the internecine conflicts between the future heroes of the victory: Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.  Mechanically invoking such supposed signposts as “appeasement” is NOT the learning from history Santayana urged on us.

So let’s get real.  You say Putin is an evil man, a Hitler? Whatever his many faults and bad deeds, these are unhelpful simplifications of yellow journalism and Manichean good-guys-vs.-bad-guys popular culture fabulism.  You say he can’t be trusted?  Can we be trusted?  Better to assume none of us can.  So how do we proceed?

Put some good things on the table alongside our demands.  The good things, it turns out, are also in our interest: mutual security arrangements; increased trade; technology sharing and regulation.  Same with China. 

And once we are all talking and focused increasingly on those mutually good things, we can start (and there is little time to waste) coming up with a shared response to climate change between the economies most responsible for causing and/or continuing the crisis: the US, the EU, Russia, China, and India.

And once the nuclear threat has receded and the climate crisis is being dealt with vigorously enough to stave off the tipping point, well, then we can start real arms control talks, and, eventually, maybe even create a non-nuclear world.  Maybe even one with a truly human-sustaining environment, a shrinking income and wealth gap within and between nations, and an international system of mutual cooperation.

Did Captain Bummer just say all that?  What did the crew slip into his drink?

Hoffmann earned his pen name and sobriquet “the Organizer” through years of work on campaigns for peace, economic justice, and environmental sustainability in numerous cities and regions of the US, as well as in Europe.