Human beings rarely participate in world politics directly, but they do get involved as individual members of separate sovereign states. Normally, the expected costs and benefits of such indirect participation remain tangible expressions of secular considerations. Though far less decipherable and recognizable, these expressions may also include implicit promises of personal immortality. [1]
There is meaningful nuance to these promises. To begin, Heinrich von Treitschke’s statement on “earthly immortality” suggests something less than the classic after-worldly meaning of immortality. [2] Plausibly, the 19th century philosopher is suggesting that something akin to eternal fame (not “corporeal life everlasting”) represents this still-mysterious dynamic of world politics. While there exist no scientifically valid ways of rank-ordering the two contending meanings of immortality over time and space (life after death versus perpetual fame), any presumptive power over death would bestow palpably greater satisfactions than any expected power over reputation.
There are variously assorted details. [3] Though difficult to understand, Realpolitik [4] – an historical shorthand for traditional power politics – draws its animating force from the microcosm, from the individual. Ultimately, while not glaringly obvious, it is this personal search for “staying alive” that drives widening-spheres of international relations. [5]
There is more. In any final reckoning, each state’s competitive struggle for the “death” of other designable states may represent a last-ditch defense against collective and personal annihilation. Among other things, this obscure simultaneity suggests that the most genuine rationale of Realpolitik [6] is not the acquisition of territory, wealth or “victory.” However unwitting or “sub-conscious,” this deeper rationale is the avoidance of personal death.[7]
This is not an easy idea for scholars and policy-makers to conceptualize; still, ignoring it could severely limit humankind’s rapidly disappearing chances for survival at all levels. Preliminary understandings could be drawn from King Charles’ III coronation. Here, it was the sovereign state, expressly blessed by God’s vicar on earth (in this case, the Archbishop of Canterbury) that holds a liberating key to life everlasting.
Prima facie, these ideas are not easily understood by any single country’s “mass” [8] or career politicians. To begin, searches for collective immortality based on sovereignty may signify
core yearnings to avoid personal death. Though such hopes can be nurtured only by convictions of faith, not of science, the history of humankind reveals no evidence that Reason can trump anti-Reason. Even in our glittering age of advanced technology and “AI,” boisterous claims of non-rational belief continue to drive states and sub-states toward a violent geopolitics. Corollary associations of sacredness with national armed force would only further ensure that war, terror or genocide serve the highest forms of human political power.
Sovereignty and Personal Power Over Death
How should these complicated connections be better understood? Why ought anyone acknowledge that a world politics based on sovereignty offers a plausible path to personal immortality? What are the most revealing connecting factors?
With pride of place, history should represent our starting point. In his illuminating classic, Man and Crisis (1958), 20th century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset comments thoughtfully and prophetically: “History is an illustrious war against death.” Though this comment is captivating and sets the stage for our own present queries about sovereignty and immortality, it still represents only a partial piece of a much wider truth: Ultimately, “power over death” identifies the greatest imaginable form of power here on earth, but acquiring such power in world politics can sometimes “demand” the killing of certain despised “others.” As more-or-less derivative from sovereign authority, there is war, terrorism and genocide.
Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.” Sovereignty offers a direct link to immortality (collective and personal), but the palpable rewards of power over death are too-frequently tied to armed force and engineered violence. [9] The most classic historical example is the Crusades.
There is more. To acquire a politically manageable “power over death,” individuals (microcosm) and states (macrocosm) must first make recognizable preparations to bring an irreversible fatality to “enemies.” At times, such viscerally belligerent thinking could involve seductive notions of “martyrdom.” Significantly, especially in the Middle East, these notions may call not “only” for war, but also for terror and genocide. [10] In all pertinent cases, the planned mass killing of other human beings is more-or-less comparable to religious sacrifice, a primal ritual oriented toward the intentional “deflection of death” to “others.” An example would be intentional Hamas killings of Israeli noncombatants, killings not only mala prohibita (“evil as prohibited”) but also malae in se (“evil in themselves.”).
There are additional details. Scholars and policy-makers should continuously re-examine vital underlying links between microcosm and macrocosm. In this regard, Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote boldly of “not being dead” as the principal exemplar of ascertainable power. Confronted with what Canetti calls “terror at the fact of death,” humankind – both individually, and collectively – seeks one particular advantage above all others. This advantage is “to remain standing” while others must prepare to “lie down.”
In the end, only those who can remain upright, however temporarily, can be “victorious.” [11] It is these fortunate ones who have keenly managed to “divert” death to “others.” By definition, there can be no greater or more advantageous kind of diversion.
A key lesson obtains here for states as well as individuals. For all “players,” microcosm and macrocosm, the situation of physical survival is always the manifestly central expression of human power. But as sovereignty-centered belligerent nationalism makes meaningful survival more problematic, Realpolitik or power politics inevitably deprives states of their most genuine power lever. Left unmodified, the “all against all” Westphalian process [12] effectively creates or merely magnifies adversarial relations and encourages state enemies to enjoy “microcosmic” triumphs that will remain concealed. More precisely, these triumphs are the deeply-satisfying human emotions experienced by persons when confronting powerless individuals who are preparing to “lie down.”
Realpolitik and Personal Immortality
In world politics, the ultimate expression of power is never about land or treasure or conquest or some other reassuring evidence of geopolitical primacy. It is, rather, a presumed victory over death, a personal triumph described by Heinrich von Treitschke and G F Hegel as linked to the unique prerogatives of sovereignty.
The relevant reasoning here is straightforward. “When my state is powerful,” goes the core argument, “so too am I.” At some point, when this state seems ready to prevail “forever,” I am granted a personal life that is also unending. Stated somewhat succinctly: An “immortal state” creates (as its citizen or subject) the “immortal person.”
Prima facie, these abstract ideas can be bewildering. Still, to actually feel such conceptual reasoning at a palpable level, one could intentionally recall the staggering images of mid-1930s Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg. Leni Riefenstahl’s monumental film celebration of Der Fuhrer, The Triumph of the Will, says it best. Reminding the German people of Hegel’s famous aphorism, the legendary film underscores that a nation-state can become “the march of God in the world.”
Today, in 2025, all states continue to be driven by policies that generally bring them neither personal satisfaction nor collective safety. All they can continue to expect in a chaos-leaning Realpolitik world is a perpetual global landscape of war, terrorism and genocide. [13] In the best of all possible worlds, however, humankind – recalling the ancient creed of Epicurus that death fear is foolish and irrational- would consider one indispensable query:
What is death? A bogy. Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done with.”
States seemingly fail to understand that death is “normally” identified by their enemies as a zero-sum event. Anything that is done to sustain one’s own national survival invariably represents, for these enemy states, an intolerable threat to their own “lives” and a diminution of their own “power over death.” Reciprocally, anything that is done to effectively eliminate hated enemies must expectedly enhance their collective life and augment their collective power. These strategies fare best whenever God is “on our side.”
There is still more. Because of the deeply intimate associations between collectivities/macrocosm (states) and (microcosm) individuals, the reciprocal life advantages of death and dying can be enjoyed doubly. “Normally,” even if only at a subconscious level, the living person never really considers himself more powerful than at that very moment when he faces the dying person. Here, as we may learn again from Elias Canetti, the living human being comes as close as he or she can to encountering genuine feelings of personal immortality.
In roughly similar fashion, the “living” nation-state never really regards itself as more powerful than at that moment when it confronts the apparently impending “death” of a despised enemy state. Only slightly less power-granting are those reassuring sentiments that arise from confrontation with a “dying” enemy state; that is, the same sentiments experienced by a belligerent state that seeks tangible “victory” over another. In both cases, personal and collective, convention, good taste and skilled statecraft require that zero-sum feelings about death and power be suppressed. Such polite feelings ought not to be flaunted; nonetheless, they do remain prospectively vital and determinative.
Reality or Shadow of Reality?
Oddly, perhaps, in all world politics, power is so closely attached to the presumed conquest of death (national and personal) that core connections have been overlooked altogether. As a result, students and practitioners of international relations continue to focus mainly on epiphenomena, [14] on easily recognizable ideologies, identifiable territories, tangible implements of warfare (arms control and disarmament) and so on. The problem is not that these factors are unimportant to power, but that they are of a manifestly secondary or reflected importance.
During a war, any war, the individual soldier, a person who ordinarily cannot experience satisfying power during peacetime, is offered a unique opportunity to remedy such absence. The pervasive presence of dead bodies in war cannot be minimized. Actually and incontestably, it is a central fact of belligerency. The soldier who is surrounded by corpses and knows that he is not yet one of them is “normally” imbued with an absolute radiance of invulnerability, of immortality, of monumental and perhaps even incomparable power.
The adversarial state that commands its soldiers to kill and not to die “feels” similarly great power at the removal of a collective adversary. This surviving state, like the surviving individual warrior, is transformed, indisputably and correspondingly, into a potentially primal source of everlasting life. Such abstract observations are hardly fashionable among general populations or political leaders; to the half-educated, they may even appear barbarous and uncivilized. Yet, for now at least, scholars should be seeking not to prescribe more appropriate behavior for sovereign states, but to accurately describe such behavior. Among other obligations, this means looking behind the daily news.
There is more. Always, truth must be exculpatory. True observations may sometimes be indecipherable or objectionable; but they are no less true. What is most important to understand is that to die for the sake of God is actually to not die at all. For example, by “dying” in a divinely commanded act of killing presumed enemies the Jihadist terrorist really does seek to conquer death, which he fears with a special terror, by “living forever.”
Ultimately, the “love of death” proclaimed by jihadi terrorists is an ironic consequent of the all-consuming wish to avoid death. Since the death that this enemy “loves” is temporary and temporal, leading “in fact” to permanent reprieve from any real death, accepting it as a tactical expedient becomes an easy matter. If, for any reason, the normally welcome death of an individual engaged in “holy war” were not expected to ensure life ever-after, its immense attractions would be reversed.
The greater the number of enemy corpses, the more powerful terrorists will feel. Real power, understood as an irremediably zero-sum commodity, is always to gain in “aliveness” through inflicting death upon enemies.
Power, Survival and Crimes Against Humanity
An enemy, whether state or non-state, cannot possibly kill as many foes as its primal passion for survival may demand. This means, among other intersecting considerations, that the adversary may seek to induce or direct others to satisfy its particular passion. As a practical matter, this deflecting behavior points toward an undeniable impulse for genocide, an inclination that could be actualized, in the future, by resort to higher-order forms of terrorism (chemical/biological/nuclear), and/or to “crimes against humanity.” [15]
On these matters of incomparable importance, the sovereign still has much to learn. But before leaders can fully understand the true nature of enemy intentions and capabilities, they must first acknowledge the most primary connections between power and survival. Once it can be understood that enemy definitions of the former are contingent on loss of the latter, these leaders will be positioned intellectually to take appropriate remedial action. At the same time, of course, these are not necessarily intellectual matters, and the expectations of blind faith often override all calculations of science.
In world politics, the true goal of certain adversaries is as grotesque as it is unrecognized. [16] This goal is to be left standing while assorted others are made to disappear. These relentless enemies, it follows, must survive just so that their enemies do not. They cannot, by this zero-sum reasoning, survive together.
So long as the enemy is “allowed” to exist, no matter how cooperative or congenial it has been, some states will not feel safe. They will not feel powerful. They will not feel power over death.
It is always a mistake to believe that Reason governs the world. The true source of governance on this imperiled planet is power, and power is ultimately the conquest of personal death. This conquest, which displays a zero-sum quality among enemies, is not limited to conflicts in any one region. Conceptually, it is always a generic matter, a more or less universal effort that is especially manifest between known enemies. On this generic matter, one should consider the revealing remark of Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco in his Journal in 1966. Describing killing as a purposeful affirmation of one’s own survival, Ionesco observed:
I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemy’s death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society; that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.
While certain enemies accept zero-sum linkages between power and survival, others do not. Though this may suggest that some states stand on an enviably higher moral plane than their enemies, it may also place the high-minded or virtuous state at a security disadvantage, one that will make it too difficult to “remain standing.” This consequential asymmetry between state enemies may be addressed by reducing certain adversarial emphases on power-survival connections and/or by increasing enemy emphases on power-survival connections.
Difficult questions will have to be asked. Must a state ultimately become barbarous in order to endure? Must it “learn” to identify true power with survival over others, a predatory posture that cannot abide the survival of certain enemies?
What is required is not a replication of enemy leadership crimes, but policies that recognize personal death-avoidance as the essential starting point for national security. With such recognition, protracted hostility and existential threat could be rejected in their entirety and a new ethos – one based on a firm commitment to “remain standing” at all costs – could finally be implemented
Sovereignty, Life Everlasting and the Killing of “Others”
Core changes will be necessary. All sovereigns must rid themselves of the retrograde notion that killing others can confer immunity from personal mortality. What is being suggested here remains the greatest form of power anywhere on earth. This is “power over death.”
Americans and other residents of our interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president of the United States and major world leaders would attempt to understand these linkages. At a minimum, this means that all of our national policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual and scientific sorts of understanding. To be sure, this point of human and national understanding has not yet been reached. It remains very distant.
There is more. Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible “medicine” against presumed adversaries in the global “state of nature.” Only by achieving this difficult awareness can we ever hope to relieve an otherwise incessant Hobbesian war of “all against all.” [17] Here, more than ever before, history deserves pride of place. The United States was founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. This means something very different in 2025 than it did in 1787.
What should this history signify for American foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon authentic learning, not on flippantly corrosive clichés or abundantly empty witticisms. In the end, for individuals, a “triumph of death” [18] in one form or another is inevitable, and attempts to avoid death by killing certain “despised others” are necessarily futile and steeply inglorious.
Going forward it is high time for new and more creative thinking about national sovereignty and human immortality. Instead of simply denying death, a cowardly and potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labels “wish fulfillment” in The Future of an Illusion (1927), we must soon acknowledge the obvious. With such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all people and states on this endangered planet could begin to think more insightfully about their immutably common destiny. In turn, this will mean using an always-overriding human commonality as the secure basis for expanding worldwide empathy and worldwide cooperation.
Requirements of Intellect and Memory
This is a visionary and fanciful prescription, one unlikely to be grasped in time. But there is a plausible way to begin. This way would require the leaders of all major states to recognize that they are not in any meaningful way “world powers” (all are equally “mortal,” and none have any verifiable “power over death”) and that a coordinated retreat from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition would be unambiguously self-interested.
There will be other considerations. The primary planetary survival task is an intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage is also needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, we could have no good reason to ever expect the arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king; still, even some utterly ordinary political leaders could prove themselves up to the extraordinary task at hand. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of all countries must first cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about sovereignty-centered world politics, and (per specific insights of twentieth-century German thinker Karl Jaspers) do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and “mind” over blind faith and “mystery.”
“In endowing us with memory,” writes philosopher George Santayana, “nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; still, without really knowing it, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.”
The legacy of Westphalia (1648 treaty) includes deification of the state. Although we may discover such murderous deification in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and several others, there have also always been compelling voices of a very different sort. For Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” It is, he says in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.” In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega y’Gasset in the Revolt of the Masses. The Spanish philosopher identifies the state as “the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it….”
Human “Sameness” and Sovereignty
In the end, sovereignty is about life, death and immortality. For the most part, it is not for us to choose when we should die. Instead, our words and our destinies will lie beyond any discernible considerations of conscious decision or individual selection. Still, we can choose to recognize our shared human fate and especially our derivative interdependence. This unbreakable intellectual recognition could carry with it significant global promise.
Much as we might prefer to comfort ourselves with qualitative presumptions of societal hierarchy and national differentiation, we humans are all pretty much the same. Already, this incontestable sameness is manifest to capable scientists and physicians. Our single most important human similarity, however, and the one least subject to any reasonable hint of counter-argument, is that we all die.
It is from the universal terror of this common fate that Westphalian law invests nation-states with the “sacred” attributes of sovereignty. And it is from the incontestable commonality of death that humankind could finally escape from the predatory embrace of power politics or Realpolitik in world politics.
Ironically, whatever our more-or-less divergent views on what might actually happen to us after death, the basic mortality that we share could represent the last best chance we have for viable global coexistence and governance. This is the case, however, only if we can first accomplish the astoundingly difficult leap from acknowledging a shared fate as mortal beings to “operationalizing” our species’ more expressly generalized feelings of empathy and cooperation.
Across an entire planet, we can care for one another as humans, but only after we have first accepted that the judgment of a resolutely common fate will not be waived by any harms that we might choose to inflict on “others,” that is, on the “unworthy.” While markedly inconspicuous, modern crimes of war, terror, and genocide are often “just” sanitized expressions of religious sacrifice. In the most starkly egregious instances, any corresponding violence could represent a consummate human hope of overcoming private mortality through the targeted mass killing or exclusion of certain specific “outsiders.” Presently, the most problematic venue of “sacrificial” thinking is the jihadist Middle East.
It’s a murderous calculus, not a new thought. Consider psychologist Ernest Becker’s ironic paraphrase of Elias Canetti in Escape from Evil: “…. each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” There is a deeply insightful observation lying latent in this metaphor. It is the uniquely dangerous notion that selected killing can confer immunity from one’s own mortality. In Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, psychologist Otto Rank affirms similarly: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.” What is being described here is nothing less than the greatest form of discoverable power: “power over death.”
Contests of Mind Over Mind
Americans and all other residents of this interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president of the United States should attempt to understand such linkages. In particular, America’s national policies should build upon more genuinely intellectual sorts of understanding. Our just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs should be conducted or calculated as intricate contests of mind over mind, not just narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter. [19]
Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible “medicine” against more-or-less foreseeable adversaries in a sovereignty-centered “state of nature.” This “natural” condition of anarchy was already well known to the Founding Fathers of the United States (most of whom had read Locke, Rousseau, Grotius, Hobbes, Vattel and Blackstone.) Only this difficult awareness can relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of “all against all.”
More than ever before, history deserves a serious reading. America was founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. But this means something quite different in 2025 than it did in 1787.
What should this particular history signify for Trump II foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon some measure of authentic learning, not on flippantly corrosive presidential clichés or abundantly empty witticisms.
Human death fear has much to do with acquiring a better understanding of America’s current enemies, both national (state) and sub-national (terrorist). Reciprocally, only people who can feel deeply within themselves the unalterable fate and sufferings of a broader global population could ever be able to embrace compassion and reject gratuitous violence. President Donald J. Trump should prepare to understand all that this implies, with pointedly specific refer to this country’s state and sub-state adversaries.
There is more. The existence of system in the world is always obvious, immutable and pertinent. Accordingly, “America First” actually means America Alone and America Last. America could never be truly “first” so long as its president insists upon achieving such status at the grievous expense of so many others, and fails to understand that international law is part of the law of the United States. To seek to secure ourselves by diminishing others – the key expectation of the Trump II playbook – would represent a retrograde prescription for recurrent instances of war, terror and genocide.
For humankind, the “triumph of death” is unassailable and inevitable. Attempts to avoid death by killing certain despised “others” are futile and inglorious. Now it is high time for new and more creative thinking about global security and human immortality. Instead of denying death, a cowardly and potentially homicidal emotion that Sigmund Freud called “wish fulfillment” (see The Future of an Illusion, 1927), we must finally acknowledge the obvious. With such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all people and all nations on this imperiled planet could begin to draw purposefully from our immutably common destiny – that is, from our conspicuously shared mortality. Among other things, this means using this always-overriding commonality as the intellectual basis for expanding empathy and a corresponding pattern of worldwide integration.
Human “oneness” is likely visionary and fanciful prescription, one unlikely to be grasped in time. There is a practical way to draw upon this prescription. But it would require the leaders of major states to recognize that they are not in any meaningful way “world powers” (in the sense that all are equally “mortal;” that none actually has “power over death”) and that a coordinated retreat from traditional geopolitical competition must be self-interested and indispensable.
Taking Science Seriously
It follows from all this that though our primary planetary survival task is an intellectual one, a matter of “mind,” unprecedented courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives to succeed, we could have no plausible reason to expect the timely arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king or even some ordinary political leaders could somehow live up to the task of becoming extraordinary. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of all countries would first have to cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about global survival, and do whatever possible to elevate authentic science over blind faith.
“In endowing us with memory,” writes George Santayana, “nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation…. the truth of mortality…. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.”
Though few will actually understand, such a “raising” is necessarily antecedent to human survival in world politics, though only if it is linked purposefully and self-consciously to global integration. Is it an end that draws near,” inquired Karl Jaspers, “or a beginning?” The correct answer will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war philosopher had to say about the Jungian/Freudian “mass.” [20]
In Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls, in German, das Mann or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon certain earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard as well as Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can suffocate indispensable intellectual growth. For Heidegger’s “The They,” the crowning untruth lies in its (1) acceptance of immortality at both institutional and personal levels, and its (2) encouragement of the seductive notion that personal “power over death” is associated with or derivative from the sovereignty-centered “sacredness” of states.
The arena of world politics (macrocosm) is violent because individual human beings (microcosm) compulsively fear death. Though patently ironic, the murderous connections are longstanding and difficult to dispute. Ultimately, individual sovereign states battle against other states on behalf of individual human salvation.
There is more. While the typical result of such redemptive battles has always been death and mega-death, not long or eternal life, an overriding mythology endures. This is the ironic belief that it is in war, not in peace, that humans are able to acquire “power over death.” Sometimes, this acquisition is intended to be direct – that is, an immediate consequence of killing on the side of God. More generally, however, such presumed power devolves indirectly to general populations that are not actually involved in the business of killing. Recalling Bob Dylan, even de facto “bystanders” can have “God on their side.”
None of this is to deny the validity of more traditional explanations of Realpolitik or power politics, namely that these struggles are about tangible goods, geography or “national security.” These conspicuous explanations are not mistaken; they are, however, both trivial and epiphenomenal. Such explanations are generally correct, but only as second-order reflections of what is most genuinely important.
In William Goldings’ novel Lord of the Flies, marooned boys make grotesque war upon one another because they have suddenly been thrust into a netherworld of anarchy and chaos, but only because this dissembling exile from “civilization” threatens them with personal death. It is only after they have settled upon an amorphous but ubiquitous horror (“the beast”) that they decide to wage a titanic struggle to survive. And in what amounts to yet another irony of upholding policies of inflicting death in order to bring freedom from death, the boys are rescued by a military ship, a naval vessel that will transport them from their literally primal state of nature to the more comprehensive state of nature in world politics.
In essence, readers quickly learn, the rancorous and barbarous conditions that had obtained on the deserted island were just a microcosm of the wider system of international relations. But who can rescue this wider system of Realpolitik from itself? Before we can meaningfully answer this core question, scholars and policy-makers will need to probe more closely behind visible events of the day, beyond mere reflection. Above all, this probe will have to be suitably theoretical.
Why? Theoretic generality is a trait of all serious scientific meaning. And scientific inquiry in such matters is indispensable.
In the beginning, in that primal promiscuity in which the lethal swerve toward power politics first arose, forerunners of modern nation-states established a system of perpetual struggle and violent conflict, a system destined to fail. Captivated by this self-destroying system of international relations, states still allow the degrading spirit of Realpolitik to spread everywhere unchecked, like an ideological gangrene on the surface of the earth. Rejecting all pertinent standards of logic and correct reasoning, this inherently false consciousness of power politics imposes no reasonable standards upon itself.
It continues to be rife, despite endless rebuffs. Somehow, Realpolitik takes its long history of defeat as victory. Somehow, its historical proponents have never learned anything.
The vast majority of human beings remain unable to accept the biological truth of mortality. Understood in terms of world politics, this suggests that national sovereignty will likely continue to be viewed by many as a suitable institutional antidote to personal death. Such a view may not be explicitly apparent even to Realpolitik adherents, and it would very likely disregard certain palpable benefits other than a presumed power over death (e.g., enhanced personal status of belonging to a “powerful” country). Nonetheless, it is a perspective that will not simply fade away graciously on its own.
It is high time for candor. Whatever our in-principle preferences, the plain fact of having been born augurs badly for any promise of immortality. Accordingly, the primal human inclination to deny an apparently unbearable truth will continue to generate the same terrors from which we presently seek refuge. The irony once again is staggering, but it is still incontestable.
In its obvious desperation to live perpetually, humankind has embraced a cornucopia of faiths that offer life everlasting is exchange for unchallengeable loyalty to a presumptively sacred duty. Such loyalty is transferred from faith to State, which battles (or prepares to battle) with other states. Though historians, political scientists and pundits routinely describe such conflicts as a struggle for secular influence (power politics), it is often something quite different. This means a struggle between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Decency and Indecency, even between the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness.” In this last example, apocalyptic imagery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is invoked not because any or all of a state’s rationale is necessarily religious, but because such imagery best portrays the enormity of ideological or faith-based attachments.
In the United States, ideas of apocalyptic contest obtained widely during the 1950s Eisenhower years, and later during the Reagan Administration. Presently, Donald Trump’s core message of “American First” is not without underlying or implicit references to righteous struggles in world politics with
“God on our Side.” For several million Trump supporters, their leader’s slogan of “America First” is essentially an eschatological code term used to signal impending End Times. In view of certain religion-based support for the Trump presidency, a principal aspect of his appeal is an implicit linkage of American sovereignty with life everlasting.
“Death,” says Norbert Elias, “is the absolute end of the person. So the greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger experienced.” Now, major states in world politics should strive more vigorously to reduce both the magnitude and likelihood of anticipated existential danger. In this connection, they must remain wary of planting new false hopes that offer only illusions of personal survival through perpetual international war or incessant war-planning.
To survive in world politics, citizens of planet earth will have to detach themselves from various mythical promises of “power over death.” In the most promising of possible worlds, the pervasively underlying human death fear could be made to disappear, but this auspicious prospect would also seem blatantly implausible. It follows that more “gentle” and reason-based orientations will be required for world politics than those discoverable within the narrowly self-destroying dynamics of sovereignty-centered belligerent nationalism.
To date, the glorious promise of life everlasting associated with sovereignty has been contingent on presumptively “heroic” exploits in world politics. If this dependency on violence could change, and the imagined benefits of immortality detached from the contrived demands of belligerent nationalism, sovereignty could become a more benign quality of Westphalian international law. In the final analysis, however, the task will be to replace Westphalian anarchy with a more reliably collaborative system of international law. At present, of course, international law figures not at all in Trump II calculations, and “might makes right” has been its shameless replacement.
Such an indispensable system would root its foundations in progressively more centralized allocations of global sovereignty and be based upon philosophic visions of human “oneness.” [21] If elements of democracy, sovereignty and power over death can be taken as correlates of earthly rule, the improvement of world legal order could draw certain needed benefits from variously unseen elements of statehood. There are much deeper meanings to the gratuitous anti-intellectualism of President Donald J. Trump than first meets the eye. It follows, inter alia, that the first arena of de-linking sovereignty and immortality must always be a world of cultivated intellect and refined thought. [22] During World War II, Swiss-German writer Hermann Hesse offered a generic description of the false national leader in The Glass Bead Game (1943): “The dull-witted brute, blindly trampling around in the flower gardens of intellect and culture.”
Notes
[1] The best philosophical treatise on these issues is still Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (The University of Chicago Press, 1957). But author and French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal is more concerned with recognizing connections between sovereignty and social co-operation than between sovereignty and immortality.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche warns famously against “the after worldly” in Zarathustra. (ca. 1885).
[3] A manifestly contrived logic here correlates “immortality” of the macrocosm (the state) to immortality of the microcosm (the individual human subject or citizen). Ipso facto, all such correlations are contrary to any verifiable criteria of science. Scholars should also consider a contra view of sovereignty by Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1932). Here, Ortega identifies the state not as a reliable source of immortality, but as its very opposite. For him, the state is “the greatest danger,” mustering its immense and irresistible resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority that disturbs it….” Earlier, in his chapter “On the New Idol” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche remarks: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters…All-too-many are born – for the superfluous the state was invented.” Later, in the same chapter: “A hellish artifice was invented there (the state), a horse of death…Indeed, a dying for many was invented there; verily, a great service to all preachers of death!”
[4] The classic statement of Realpolitik in western philosophy is the cynical comment of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic: “Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” (See Plato, The Republic, 29, Benjamin Jowett, tr., World Publishing Company, 1946.) See also: Cicero’s oft-quoted query: “For what can be done against force without force?” Marcus Tullus Cicero, Cicero’s Letters to his Friends, 78 (D.R. Shackleton Baily tr., Scholars Press, 1988). Inter alia, the following essay seeks to clarify that although Cicero’s query makes perfect “common sense,” it is also superficial. In essence, therefore, this query is both obvious (rhetorical) and incomplete.
[5] As a matter of science and logic, of course, any such search is senseless ipso facto. Recall philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ succinct declaration: “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.” (See God, Death and Time; 1993; 2000).
[6] On the various meanings of Realpolitik, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984).
[7] The philosopher Martin Heidegger considers the state’s promise of such avoidance the “sweetest opium of the people.”
[8] For an early look at such understanding difficulties, by this author, see: Louis René Beres, “Self-Determination, International Law and Survival on Planet Earth,” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 11. No. 1 (1994).
[9] At the same time, Emmerich de Vattel’s “first principle” of the Law of Nations is the mutual independence and dependence of sovereign states. Though “foreign nations have no right to interfere in the government of an independent state….” (II, sec. 57), these states are “bound mutually to promote the society of the human race…” and, correspondingly, “owe one another all the duties which the safety and welfare of that society require.” As Vattel clarifies in the Introduction to his 1758 classic: “What one man owes to other men, one Nation, in its turn, owes to other Nations.” In principle, at least, this is a potentially transformative legal imperative, one abundantly rich in sovereignty-based assumptions and possibilities.
[10] See Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, opened for signature, December 9, 1948, entered into force, January 12, 1951, 78 U.N.T.S. 277. Although the criminalizing aspect of international law that proscribes genocide‑like conduct may derive from a source other than the Genocide Convention (i.e. it may emerge from customary international law and be included in different international conventions), such conduct is dearly a crime under international law. Even where the conduct in question does not affect the interests of more than one state, it becomes an international crime whenever it constitutes an offense against the world community delicto ius gentium. See M.C. Bassiouni, International Criminal Law: A Draft International Criminal Code 30‑44 (1980). See also Bassiouni, “The Penal Characteristics of Conventional International Criminal Law,” 15 Case W. Res. J. Int’l 27‑37 (1983).
[11] See by this author at Oxford University Press: Louis René Beres, https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/war-political-victories/
[12] The historical referent of this process is the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a treaty which concluded the Thirty Years War and created the now still-existing decentralized or self-help “state system.” See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia. For the authoritative sources of international law, see art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: STATUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE, Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force, Oct. 24, 1945; for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945. 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, 3 Bevans 1153, 1976 Y.B.U.N., 1052.
[13] Though international law does not specifically advise particular penalties or sanctions for states that choose not to prevent or punish genocide committed by others, all states, notably the “major powers” belonging to the UN Security Council, are bound, among other things, by the peremptory obligation (defined at Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) known as pacta sunt servanda, to act in continuous “good faith.” In turn, this pacta sunt servanda obligation is derived from an even more basic norm of world law. Known commonly as “mutual assistance,” this civilizing norm was most famously identified within the classical interstices of international jurisprudence, most notably by eighteenth-century legal scholar, Emmerich de Vattel, in The Law of Nations (1758).
[14] See by this writer, Professor Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zürich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/
[15] Under authoritative international law, crimes against humanity are defined as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during a war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated….” See Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Aug. 8, 1945, Art. 6(c), 59 Stat. 1544, 1547, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, 288
[16] This includes sub-state terrorist adversaries. Explicit applications of the law of war to such combatants’ dates to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. As more than codified treaties and conventions must comprise the law of war, the obligations of jus in bello (justice in war) are part of “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” (Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice) and thereby bind all categories of belligerents. (See Statute of the International Court of Justice, art. 38, June 29, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. 993). Hague Convention IV of 1907 declares that even in the absence of a precisely published set of guidelines regarding “unforeseen cases,” the operative pre-conventional sources of humanitarian international law obtain and still govern all belligerency. The related Martens Clause is included in the Preamble of the 1899 Hague Conventions, International Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War by Land, July 29, 1899, 187 Consol. T.S. 429, 430.
[17] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2022/01/louis-beres-international-law-state-of-nature/
[18] This brings to mind the oil painting (The Triumph of Death) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1562).
[19] Also important would be to acknowledge that international legal rules and expectations are part of US domestic law. In precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[20] “The mass-man,” we learn from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses, 1930), “has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.”
[21] The history of western philosophy and jurisprudence includes illustrious advocates of “oneness.” Notable among them are Voltaire and Goethe. More precisely, we may recall Voltaire’s biting satire in the early chapters of Candide and Goethe’s oft-repeated comment linking belligerent nationalism to the declining stages of any civilization. We may also note Samuel Johnson’s expressed conviction that patriotism “is the last refuge of a scoundrel;” William Lloyd Garrison’s observation that “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government…Our country is the world, our countryman is all mankind;” and Thorsten Veblen’s comment that “The patriotic spirit is at cross-purposes with modern life.” Similar sentiments are discoverable in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human. Let scholars also recall Santayana’s coalescing remark in Reason and Society: “A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.” The unifying point of all such cosmopolitan remarks is that narrow-minded patriotism is not “merely” injurious, it is de facto “unpatriotic.” Though proclaimed with robotic fanfare, such alleged patriotism can never actually serve the tangible interests of a state’s citizens or subjects.
[22] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…. It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D. Princeton 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with literature, art, philosophy, international relations and international law. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he was born in Zürich at the end of World War II. Dr. Beres’ twelfth and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) (2nd. ed., 2018) http://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/content/surviving-amid-chaos-israels-nuclear-strategy. His writings can be found in The New York Times; The Atlantic; The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; The Hudson Review; The National Interest; JURIST; Modern Diplomacy; US News & World Report; Horasis (Switzerland); World Politics (Princeton); Daily Princetonian; Yale Global Online; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); Yale Global; Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Israel Defense; BESA (Israel); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); and several dozen national and international law journals. Professor Beres is a seven-times contributor to the Oxford University Press Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence (Oxford University) and a member of the Oxford University Press Editorial Advisory Board for the annual Yearbook.
