My View: Can U.S. seize the moment for peace?

By Greg Mello
June 16, 2024

There is no way to peace, peace is the way.”

— A.J. Muste

A.J. Muste was right, of course. Today, these timeless words could light for us the path through what William Schryver has called “the bitterness of strategic defeat” in Ukraine and beyond, if we can accept them. Accept peace and prosper, for a change.

These words also contain a prescription for a new arms control paradigm — and possibly, someday in the distant future but alas not before, nuclear disarmament.

Old-style arms control is dead and will never be revived because the world has changed. Core arms control assumptions included a U.S. that would continue to “lead” the world economically and militarily, and a U.S. society that would remain more or less unchanged in its prosperity and its façade of democracy.

All that is fading. We are in a whole new world.

Suddenly, nuclear war is a real possibility again. If there is a silver lining to this, it lies in the widening realization that the U.S. cannot go on trying to dictate terms to the world from its “exceptional” position atop an arbitrary, “rules-based international order.”

In the old world order, a vast military establishment, coupled with financial control and threats of regime change, have been the “hardware.” The “software” has been a messianic, increasingly “woke” liberalism. Most of the world, including more and more people in the U.S., now see this for what it is: neocolonialism and cultural destruction.

In its place, a diverse, multipolar world is rising. The U.S. will become one nation among others. We can’t afford to control the world, and why should we? The arrogance and futility of our 700 or so military bases worldwide will become more apparent, as will the folly of spending more than half of all federal discretionary funds on a sprawling national security state.

These vast sums have created what amounts to a second government, and it’s in control. As Michael Glennon writes, the Constitutional (Madisonian) institutions of the Executive, Congress and federal courts no longer control the post-1947 Trumanite institutions of the Pentagon, intelligence community and National Security Council.

This has been a horrible mistake, one to which the crumbling infrastructure, vast inequality, skyrocketing debt and increasing social failure here in the U.S. testifies. Internationally, the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the deep alliance between Russia and China, what will be the military defeat of the West in Ukraine and its moral defeat in Gaza add up to a kind of comprehensive defeat for U.S. “old-think.” Week by week, the increasingly senile Biden and the incompetent people around him are making all this worse, doubling down on their failures. Biden has the power to immediately end the war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Will he? There is no sign of that.

In Ukraine, the people controlling Biden want to continue the war at least through the election, if enough cannon fodder can be found. Meanwhile, the deeper the West commits to that war, the greater the war hysteria in Congress and in Europe, and the greater the danger of a larger war. Biden’s back is against the wall. He has done this to himself and to us, by failing to negotiate in 2021-22 and then scuttling the Istanbul peace negotiations in the spring of 2022. There was never any way Ukraine could win that war.

Some kind of peace will come to Ukraine, but what about us? Will we accept a new kind of leadership role — in peace, toward peace — or will the U.S. remain what Martin Luther King Jr. called it, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today?”

Greg Mello is executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.