Naïveté

In a tough and complex world, people tending to the left side of the political spectrum are often accused of starry-eyed naïveté when they push for the prevention of war and the building of peace through law, diplomacy and budgetary control over military forces—replacing the law of force with the force of law. The operating paradigm of the hawkish, by contrast, is peace through strength: no amount of weapons is ever enough and the glove of diplomacy only thinly covers the iron fist of force. These are caricatures, simplified to make a point.

We now have a Secretary of Defense who is himself a caricature, and the engine that motivates him is a naïveté so deep that he has been rightfully eviscerated in the media. His conception of the resolution of international conflict is tattooed on his own body. His models of choice are Christian-Muslim wars in the Mid-East that ran for two centuries and ended about 1300. It would be more amusing if it did not lead to catastrophes like the mass slaughter of schoolchildren.

Mr. Hegseth is almost too ripe a target. But the bigger picture suggests an underexamined naïveté in establishment thinking about international relations generally. The global security regime has encouraged the strong possibility of apocalyptic scenarios which one would assume experts would try far harder to avoid, accidents waiting to happen.

The first such scenario that comes to mind is that 20-minute moment when a leader must decide how to respond to signals that one or more ballistic missiles are incoming and have gotten past any defensive measures (the plot of the powerfully understated film “House of Dynamite”). The choice becomes to do nothing, or launch in response and risk that Armageddon was based on a mistake. Isn’t there an extraordinary naïveté in the fatalist assumption that nothing can be done about this insanity? Especially when it is so clearly in every nation’s shared best interest to change it?

But this naïveté/insanity is based on the pervasive assumption of peace through strength: the weapons are ready for instant use so that they will never be used—forever. Isn’t this really as laughably naïve as Mr. Hegseth’s killing Muslims for Christ?

The truth is more ominous. Think of what’s really out there “protecting” us: thousands upon thousands of world-destroying warheads, connected to thousands of computers and early-warning sensors, connected to thousands of fallible, however well-trained, human beings.

But it’s not as if all this weaponry reinforces a balanced opposition of power. It is taking place within two rapidly changing contexts: the back-and-forth of the planet’s various conventional wars, and the perpetual motion of we build/they build technological advances (with the military use of A.I upping the instability ante.)

What could go wrong?

And yet the vast majority of the commentariat that fills our airways with opinions is fundamentally OK with our all-in-the-same-leaky-boat condition.

The naïveté of a leader like Benjamin Netanyahu may be more wily but is basically similar to Hegseth’s. Like the Secretary, Netanyahu trafficks in the familiar “either you’re with us or against us” fallacy. He uses the dual context of the Holocaust and of the October 7th Hamas attack to give no quarter to his many adversaries and no hope to the Palestinians. To transform oneself from victim to “invincible” storm-trooper invulnerability and lay to waste, even preëmptively, all perceived enemies is functionally naïve if only because it will never lead to Israeli’s security.

We live in radically new conditions. Two other Jews laid it out for us: Einstein said in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” And Jesus suggested a path that sounds naïve to hawks but seems more realistically imperative by the day: that we must learn to love our enemies as much as we love ourselves. Challenging as that ideal may seem, it wouldn’t be as difficult as trying to pick up the pieces after WW3.

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