'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

If US citizens truly believed that all persons are created equal...

The US's Founding Fathers famously  declared that " We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal..."

Our national population makes up somewhere under 5% of the world's total.  Each US citizen, on average, was responsible in 2004 for the puffing out of 20 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a national total of  5.91 billion metric tons.)  Actually, that last link, which is to an official US Department of Energy database, understates the real dimension of the problem, since it's an Excel file that charts only CO2 emissions from the consumption and flaring of fossil fuels-- leaving out other causes of CO2 emissions. But no matter.

So if all 6.3 billion people in the world really are equal, then each should also have the "right" to emit their own 20 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year... Right?

That would come to 126 billion metric tons...  Nearly five times the current world emission rate.

Last fall, the UK government's chief economist, Nicholas Stern, pulled together the best information available anywhere on human-induced climate and the foreseeable costs of (a) not doing anything about it, and (b) doing something to truly bring the problem under control.  The scientists he consulted said that worldwide CO2 emissions need to be brought down beneath five billion metric tons a year if very damaging, potentially speciescidal, human-induced climate change through CO2 emissions is to be ended.

George W. Bush asserts the "right" of the US to emit just as much CO2 as it pleases... But the Founding Fathers told us that all men [and women] are created equal.  Can both claims be upheld?  If we renege on one of them, which should it be?

... Okay, here's another similar conundrum.  I don't need to repeat the famous (and in my view extremely important) claim made by our nation's Founding Fathers.

So in 2005, the US spent $1,637 on military goods and service for each citizen of the Republic.  (Next highest per-capita rates among significant world powers were France and the UK, neither of which spent more than $860 per head.)  Those figures are all from my copy of the IISS's Military Balance 2007.

So if every country in the world asserted a "right" to engage in per-capita military spending at the same rate as the US, then total world military spending would be $10.3 trillion...  Instead of $1.2 trillion, which was what it actually was in 2005.

And instead of the world having just twelve US carrier battle groups and a few other nations' naval formations rushing around its oceans, there would be 228 additional carrier battle groups also clogging up the seas.  (Do you have any idea how much sea a whole carrier battle group occupies?)  And many of those additional CBGs would likely be steaming around as close to our coastlines as our CBGs like to go to the coastlines of, for example, China or Iran...  And if this whole global hyper-arming business were really evened out on a population-proportional basis, then 48 of those CBGs would indeed be Chinese.

Somehow, the whole world has gotten itself into this quite unsustainable position whereby US military power has become quite disproprtionate to any notions of human fairness or equality.  And what's more, this bloated US military is not actually very good any more at winning (and holding) any worthwhile strategic goals.  That's the dirty little secret of US military power, that has been exposed more than ever before by the still-unfolding, horribly tragic debacle in Iraq.

(Just as Israel's much-vaunted military power was incapable of winning any worthwhile strategic goals in Lebanon, last year.)

The world has changed.  It actually started changing back in August 1945, which was the world's inaugural (and ultimate) "shock and awe" moment. In 1946, the brilliant strategic thinker Bernard Brodie looked back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wrote "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose."  The Cold War dulled the impact of Brodie's basic message somewhat for the next 45 years--except that, of course, the strategy of war-deterrence that he advocated was indeed the organizing leitmotif of the whole Cold War... 

But what we are seeing now, I think, is that Brodie's message applied much more widely than "just" to the Soviet Union.  And we should remember, anyway, that when he expressed his important judgment about the need to focus on war-aversion, the Soviets still didn't have any nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the return of Brodie-ism is the subject of another JWN post I'm kind of planning... Under the title, perhaps, of "US militarism: The God that failed."  The point of this present post, though, is to call my fellow Amurrcans back to some deep thinking about whether we really do still hold to the ideal of human equality... and what that should mean for the kinds of policy that our country pursues today.

(Important to note: When the Founding Fathers talked about people being created equal they notably did not restrict that to US citizens. They did, unfortunately, restrict it to "men"-- and of course, they did not at the time extend it in practice to non-white men or even in any meaningful way to white men who were not also property holders.  But still, the fact that they talked about all "men" being equal, and not only the citizens of the then-colonies, was important for their argument at the time.  And it is equally important for my argument-- my call to conscience on the issue of human equality-- today.)