Newsweek For Sale

The Washington Post is trying to sell Newsweek Magazine because it lost $28 million last year, with circulation down more than a third since 2000. A journalism professor explains that a mass circulation publication is “just not going to cut it in this highly niched, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.” (NYT, 5-6-10)

The Times writer, Stephanie Clifford, comments, “The notion of a cultural common ground that Americans could all share was changing.” Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham observed that “national coherence was still a worthwhile goal...There are not that many common denominators left.”

You said it! We had better figure what we have in common, speaking of Americans and of the rest of humanity as well. May I suggest security as the common ground - security from war, from terrorism, from Weapons of Mass Destruction, from environmental disaster. Plenty of people would agree - question is, do they have enough civic, political spirit and gumption to act on it, to get beyond the supplication of sign holding and marching and reach for power that can counter the vested interests in mayhem.

On display at this very moment are ratification of START and progress on non-proliferation. The nuclear targeted populations have projected no effective voice about Senate ratification or about the NPT five year review conference, though lives by the million, and civilization itself hangs in the balance.

If targeted populations exercised the survival instincts that they would exercise if they were hunted animals in a forest, which they are beginning to resemble, their clamor would batter down every political, monetary, ideological, and historical block to replacing the world of war with a world of enforced law. They might even discover they still needed common sources of news instead of clicking away separately at their favorite web feeds.

Getting To The Promised Land

No one in his right mind would start for the Promised Land unless the trip was imperative and he had a travel plan. Our counterpart to the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army is nuclear holocaust - we have to leave the Egypt of nuclear holocaust behind us. Our counterpart to Moses’ Ten Commandments, though, has yet to be drafted.

President Obama, Sam Nunn and others who advocate getting to Zero Nuclear put off describing a plan, not unreasonably, by saying that it will take decades to reach Zero. Not in my lifetime, says the President; the mountain must be scaled in stages, says Nunn. They hope that evidence of progress like the START Treaty, and improvements under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, will evidence progress enough to keep momentum.

Staged progress without a plan will not be enough for some. Examples of what Obama, Nunn, et al are up against appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (“The NPT Illusion” by Brett Stephens) and Financial Times (“A Nuclear-Free World? No Thanks” by Gideon Rachman).

Rachman predicts that a nuclear free world would herald the return of war between big powers. He says that only an “implausibly powerful international inspectorate” could calm the fears that produce nuclear arming. These are reasonable observations if one makes no effort to describe the disarmed world.

Stephens offers a good guys - bad guys analysis - if bad ones arm, good ones cannot disarm. True enough, but he can’t imagine enforced mutuality. He hits the target, offering no solution, by concluding that in the “second nuclear age” deterrence won’t work and “we haven’t even begun to think seriously about how to navigate those waters.”

The problem with long-term thinking like Zero Nuclear is, first, if you suggest details about how it might work you  are discredited as time passes because so much gets revised. Second, you will be called idealist, and vilified for suggesting a different world, which upsets the non-visionary, non-imaginative folk, those most wary of change, i.e., conservatives, though I do not mean it pejoratively.

The solution for this dilemma of how much detail to hazard when you preach vision, is to describe a means to make the journey - how to travel, not what the destination will look like. Tell who will have a say, how will we experiment, how the rule of enforced law will be expanded in stages, how will we retain the security of armed might while developing the security of enforced law, how targeted populations of different kinds of nations can make common cause against the violence lovers in all nations.

Rachman’s “powerful international inspectorate” must be shorn of implausibility by showing the partial models that already work, the stages of enlargement, the assurances that militarized security need not be surrendered until a safer model is available, and the cross border democracy that must be invented and gradually expanded to keep delegation of enforcement powers accountable.

Complex or Neglected?

Today’s Sunday Times has a feature piece by David Segal asking whether society will collapse because it is too complex. Examples of complexity are drawn from the financial melt down, the BP oil spill, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Seems some professors have been saying that the Romans and other historical has-beens declined and fell due to their complexities, and we will, too. Segal sums up, “There is no point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope the solutions are just complicated enough to work.”

I disagree with Segal’s conclusion. The modern public policy imbroglios that he cites are due to policies, laws, and rules being surrendered by the citizenry to private opportunists. The opportunists resort to complexity as they camouflage profits, political reward, ideological crusades, and so on. Instead of a rational system, the outcome is non-functional, jerry-built monstrosities that collapse, explode, leak, and all the rest.

My book, City, Save Thyself! Nuclear Terror and the Urban Ballot concentrates on a single public issue, the WMD threat, but my conclusions apply as well to the screw-ups that Segal cites. I offer three recommendations, and others that flow from these.

First, instead of trying to figure out what we should do today or this year to meet crises, we should think ahead fifty years, imagine a secure world, imagine the essential components of that world, and formulate policies for today and this year that will produce security. One inevitable conclusion will be to substitute enforced law for war as the route to security, after adopting some form of the global democracy that must precede the delegation of international enforcement powers.

Second, instead of playing one’s democratic hand solely in national and state elections, where outcomes are determined by money, media, and the gerrymander, or in lobbying power holders who answer to private interests, some number of concerned citizens, a large number but it would not require a majority, should self-select themselves to fight for their share of power, and to do so in the arena where power still is obtainable, in their cities and towns. Joining NGO peace groups, marching, and writing letters to editors is fine if one has time, but does not produce the power to simplify our security problems (or our financial, or energy, or other issues whose outcomes are in the hands of the self-interested).

Third, instead of serving as they have for sixty years as passive targets in a complex and civilization threatening web of ICBMs and nuclear armed submarines, the cities and towns of the world should form a global security congress of municipalities that would pressure their nations to transform the complex war system into a rational and therefore inherently simpler system of enforced law.

Contributing to our peril is the distrust that professors and media people have for democracy and citizens, which takes us back to self-selection and the necessity to contest for power.

The Policy We Don't Have

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been in the news the last two days because he wrote a secret three page memorandum admitting that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy on Iran. (NYT, April 18, 19)

The policy that we don’t have as to Iran’s presumptive quest for nuclear weapons is the same policy that we don’t have as to the long term aim to reach zero nuclear weapons world-wide. The missing policy is a policy to replace force based security with security through enforced law. President Obama champions the goal of nuclear zero, but does not dare assert that it cannot be reached by arms reductions and non-proliferation treaties alone, as essential as they may be to assist the process.

Dependable security requires not just nuclear zero but war zero. Before Iran and a good many other nations including the United States will substitute security through enforced law in place of weapons superiority, an alternative security mechanism must exist. This will necessitate the same components as all nations depend on for domestic security - administrative, judicial, and police resources, but on an international scale. And, before it will be safe to empower international law enforcement institutions, global democracy must be erected adequate to make the power holders accountable.

In 1949, just before the Cold War began, Democrats and Republicans alike anticipated the United Nations evolving into such an institution. 111 co-sponsors in the House and 21 in the Senate favored concurrent resolutions stating that it should be a “fundamental objective” of U.S. foreign policy to develop the U.N. into a “world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.”

The co-sponsors included Republicans Jacob Javits, Christian Herter, Gerald Ford, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Democrats John F. Kennedy, Henry Jackson, Abraham Ribicoff, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, John Sparkman, Lister Hill, and Russell Long.

Frantic preoccupation with military force will not permit even the best of today’s Congress Members to offer such leadership. They would be vilified and lose their seats at the next election. This is why the initiative must come from another power base. The only power base in sight unless one controls a media empire or has a billion dollars, is our cities and towns. As the targets of WMD attack by terrorists on in the event of war, they have the right to be heard. They also are within the political reach of citizens world-wide, as national governments are not. Gates is right - we have no policy for Iran. Iran does however have cities and towns that cities and towns in other nations might reach.

Two Things At Once

The politics of ratification and the military’s strategic judgement will exact a price for such comfort as we can draw from the Nuclear Posture Review, the Nuclear Security Summit, and hopefully, the Non Proliferation Treaty Five Year Review in May. Part of the cost is to spend huge amounts that, according to many experts, is unnecessary, to “extend” the life of the nuclear arsenal that is not scheduled for discard. Another is to continue huge conventional arms budgets so as to make credible the promise of non-nuclear retaliation in the event of attack with chemical or biological weapons on the U.S. or its “nuclear umbrella” protectees. A third is to join enthusiastically in the current world-wide missile race, both defensive and attack missiles.

To arm while disarming is to perform two contrary tasks at once. Doing two things at once is hard - for people and for countries. Do I concentrate on two sets of facts and goals or attack them one at a time? There is my emotional commitment - hard to split, or spread. There is my credibility - how to communicate security and conviction about more than one subject at a time? There are resources - from hours in the day to money to manpower. With countries, there is political opportunism - if one goal is slighted, the opposition will champion it, and claim that the other goal must not be pursued simultaneously. There are unshakeable devotees, emotionally, irretrievably committed to, or advantaged by, one goal and opposed to the other, even if the two are in fact compatible.

A nation that must be prepared for war while trying to keep peace is faced with all this and more. War usually wins, because to prepare for peace seems inconsistent. To remove causes of war and enforce peace would weaken the nation. War always is there first, commanding money and emotion, enlisting war veterans, the business establishment, the misinformed and uninformed, arousing excitement, dreams of glory, and entertaining the populace.

You hear about peace mostly after peace has been lost. Peace necessitates law creation, adjudication, enforcement, and the politics that will deliver the power to create them. It is easier to build missiles, planes and tanks. They cost more but create profits and jobs and provide spectacle.

This argues for mounting peace efforts through some other vehicle than nations. Yes, peace must be between nations, more or less by definition. But let us stop expecting nations to carry the peace burden. Let us design peace and enlist the citizens of the nations to demand peace, through the cities and towns of the world, which, after all are the targeted, terminal victims of the next war, whether started with missiles or suitcase terrorist devices.

It would be relatively simple for a few cities and towns in a handful of countries to hold a security conference every year. They could legitimize the effort by putting a slot on their municipal ballots to elect representatives to the conference.

Disarmament as a Pejorative

The problem with President Obama’s vision of a nuclear free world is that he refrains from identifying its components. The political far right, simple minded and militaristic, reflexively characterizes all arms reduction efforts as disarmament, always meaning unilateral disarmament.


The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial on April 8, “Dreams of Disarmament,” applied the disarmament opprobrium first to the Nuclear Posture Review, then to the forty year old Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, and finally to the New START Treaty. WSJ winds up by asserting that arms control is “more theological than practical.”

Charles Krauthammer writes in Investor’s Business Daily (April 12) that what the President is trying to do is insane, morally bizarre, naive, and strategically loopy, all his terms.

The President concentrates on today’s primary danger, which is terrorist efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. Right wing fear mongers, ironically, ignore this threat, because they have no answer for it and their political success is based on the child-speak with which they have marshaled voters ever since World War II.

To reach Zero nuclear weapons necessitates many steps, and this month’s and next month’s efforts are only two of them - arms reductions and preventing weapons spread. The President would be well advised to describe more of the future steps, including the substitution of international law enforcement for superpower peace keeping. He knows, though, that to enlarge public comprehension, necessary as it is, will invite further accusations of loopy unilateral disarmament.

The missing voice is that of the threatened populations. They have no voice but their nations’ and nations serve a variety of masters. Nations serve the interests that control them, the interests of the individuals who from time to time comprise the national governments. Those interests are financial, political, and ideological. Another voice is needed, one that is authentic, non-political, and free to invent, one that can tell the potential victims of nuclear holocaust how security must be achieved. NGOs are helpful, but lack the authenticity of a public voice.

The missing link is cities. Were they organized to speak up for their residents, President Obama would find a potent ally when a serious effort arises, as it apparently will, to defeat START’s Senate ratification. He could use cities during the NPT Review next month, recalling how John Bolton and the Bush minions defeated the last five year Review. He could use them even more when he gets ready to discuss the further steps that must precede Zero, steps toward global law enforcement and global democracy that must accompany enforcement.

Targets of the World, Unite!

Of all affronts no one should tolerate, none is worse than having one’s city targeted by nuclear armed ICBMs. How many of the millions around the world who live in such cities are aware they are targeted, or think about it? Five percent? Probably fewer.


Mutual targeting by the U.S. and Russia, twenty years after the Cold War, is no secret. Presumably, the U.S. and China also target each other, but we don’t target our “allies” Britain, France, and Israel. Presumably, Israel targets Iran and Syria to deter a conventional weapons attack.

In many countries, not identified but I see figures between 30 and 40, people live under the American nuclear “umbrella.”  They refrain from acquiring nuclear arms on the promise that the U.S. will retaliate on their behalf against a nuclear attack. Do these folks wonder whether in fact the U.S. would risk a nuclear attack on American cities by retaliating against an attack on another country? Do Americans wonder whether they are exposed to attack by enemies of other countries because the U.S. has pledged to retaliate against such an enemy although not attacked itself?

How great is the danger of a frame-up, of an attack by terrorists, for instance, that looks like an attack requiring U.S. retaliation on behalf of an umbrella nation? One can go on with scenarios in which millions of peaceful humans serve as hostages to a war system that they could end if they marshaled their cities on behalf of enforced law over endless war.

A timely first step would be for Americans and Russians to cause their city governments to promote ratification and accelerated implementing of the new START Treaty. For starters, many cities and towns in states whose Senators are considered undependable for ratification of START, belong to a global organization of three thousand plus “Mayors for Peace” cities. These cities are listed on the Mayors of Peace website. Elected officials and citizen delegations from those cities should be in instant, continuous communication with their Senators about ratifying START.