
“The dust from which the first man was created was gathered in all four corners of the earth.” - Talmud
By any reasonable standard, the cumulative effects of belligerent nationalism are universally injurious and the predictable product of anti-reason. More particularly, these corrosive effects - spawned by the mantra of "everyone-for-himself" - lie inherent in all policies of “America First.” Cumulatively, such effects, prima facie, could undermine each and every country's national security.
Why has there been so little learning? How has this continuously discredited "balance of power" dynamic managed to remain the determinative template of international relations and international law? To what extent is this ironic persistence related to vital legal concepts of sovereignty and self-determination? How could any such war-oriented configuration have been reconciled with already well-defined obligations to preserve world peace and counter aggression?
This last query is especially troubling at a time of escalating Russian aggression against Ukraine and re-calibrations of power in the Middle East.
There are additional questions to raise about international law and world politics. Why are there still no tangible movements to build constructively upon organic human “oneness,” a unity with deep roots in the Jewish Talmud? Why has there been so little evident dissatisfaction with worldwide anarchy and with a steadily approaching global chaos? Are we humans merely "mass" to be manipulated by narrowly selfish national leaders, an inert species unable to act even in its own survival interests?
Says Rabbi Avraham Kook: “The loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.” Following Kook's reassuringly cosmopolitan thought, is there a specifically Jewish-philosophical view to be considered here?
There is still more for capable legal scholars and philosophers to examine. Why is there so little willingness in the United States and elsewhere to look “behind” the daily news, to understand markedly underlying issues of law and ethics? Few in the West could reasonably expect their political leaders to resemble Plato's "philosopher king," but should to be able to expect leaders who can suitably understand and value the interrelated benefits of history, philosophy, literature, science and law.
The false mantra of "America First" is visibly refractory and stubbornly unsupportable. The notion that an exploitative and self-centered American philosophy could guide the United States in law-enforcing directions is incorrect on its face. To wit, drawn in part from earlier Jewish philosophy, the Natural Rights premises of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution emphasize equality and cooperation as rudimentary legal values. In the words of Samuel von Pufendorf, whose work was essential to Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers: "One of the common duties of the Natural Law is that no one who has not acquired a peculiar right arrogate more to himself than the rest may have, but permit others to enjoy the same rights as himself."
"America First," at face value, is thus unreasonable and indecent. This assessment is also anchored in Jewish-philosophic principles concerning correct behavior, most notably ones of human cooperation, human "oneness"and law-based community. Significantly, these principles have long been at the core of Western philosophy and jurisprudence.
A very clear and continuing connection exists between Jewish Law and Natural Law: “Whatever a competent scholar will yet derive from the Law, that was already given to Moses on Mount Sinai,” said the rabbis. Over time, all humanly enacted laws are expected to be in accord with Natural Law and Reason. Wherever a human law is at variance with any particulars of the Natural Law, it is no longer genuinely legal, but merely a jurisprudential corruption.
Laments Irish poet William Butler Yeats, "There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candle light." Policies that had once "merely" been wrong can quickly become openly murderous and potentially genocidal, especially if accompanied by an "everyone for himself" orientation to world politics.
Results of the Covid-19 pandemic mandated not a more bitterly competitive world power politics, but a more fully far-reaching pattern of global interdependence. This suggests a pattern embracing numerous intersecting matters (some of them synergistic) and operating on multiple levels. Americans must not wittingly ignore the obvious: In history, no foreign policy prescriptions founded upon a posture of rancor and violence has ever succeeded.
In an increasingly asymmetrical (very rich/very poor) world, a shallow and irrational vision of "America First" is irremediably flawed. This a-historical vision is not directed toward any national or international advantage, but to endlessly Darwinian struggles for pretended national preeminence.
US national interests can never be served at the intentional expense of other states. Always, these American interests must be served together with those interests of other states and nations, sometimes even where international relations have become more-or-less bitterly adversarial.
In the end, only truth can be exculpatory. In the end, and at every crucial level of assessment - military, economic, biological and legal - American security is linked with the wider "human condition." This primal link was well-known by the Founding Fathers of the United States via Blackstone's Commentaries (the principal foundation of US law) and by Blackstone's own jurisprudential foundations in Emmerich de Vattel's classic The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758). "Each state," says Vattel, "owes to every other state all that it owes to itself." Today, no principle could be more basic to national and international law. Invariably, America's national policy expectations will need to be more conspicuously based upon law, reason and serious thought.
Truth is the final arbiter, and not just in pertinent matters of law or policy, but also in ethics, but today's national and geopolitical truth is grim and unforgiving.
There is more. Especially ominous in a non-qualified vision of “America First” is its willful destruction of empathy. For Americans, the consequences of such impending destruction ought finally to have become obvious. The monstrous global consequences of "Germany First" - a direct ideological antecedent of "America First" - should already have exhibited stinging historical resonance.
There exist deep human roots to the force-multiplying problems of empathy and “oneness.” Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost two hundred of which are called "nation-states," too many human beings still find it pleasing to slay "others." As for any remediating considerations of compassionate human feeling, that indispensable sentiment is typically reserved only for a Few. That is, for those who live within one’s own starkly delineated "tribe."
Regarding law and justice on planet earth, any expansions of empathy to include “outsiders" remain a basic condition of peace and global cooperation. Without such a necessary expansion, our entire species will remain dedicated to its own continuous debasement. Understanding this particular bit of geopolitical wisdom ought much earlier to have become a helpful corrective to the belief in "America First."
To be sure, we need viable remedies to this sordid and self-defeating American resurrection. But what fixes, if any, are still plausibly available? What must Americans actually do in order to encourage a wider law-supporting pattern of empathy? How can a U.S. president work to improve the state of our crumbling world legal order?
These are not easy questions, but they need to be asked.
Quo Vadis; what next?
There is at least one evident “fly in the ointment.” The essential expansion of empathy for the many could quickly become “dreadful,” improving human community but only at the cost of private sanity. This prospectively insufferable cost is integral to the way we humans were originally "designed," that is, as more-or-less "hard wired" beings, persons with distinctly recognizable and largely "impermeable" boundaries of private feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion toward too many others could bring about our own irreversible emotional collapse.
All this should be easy to recognize and understand. As a ready example, consider how difficult it would be if all of us were to suddenly feel the same or similarly compelling pangs of sympathy and compassion for others outside our primary spheres of attachment as are felt for family and friends we have located "inside" this preferential sphere.
This is not a simple problem. It presents a markedly challenging intellectual paradox. Long ago, it was already under examination in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a Talmudic tradition that scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the whole world is said to rest upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov. These suffering figures are generally indistinguishable from other ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were ever absent, the resultant tribulations of humankind would become staggering, poisoning all souls, even of the newly-born.
Such a Talmud-elucidated paradox has potentially useful contemporary meaning for the United States. This modernized signification reveals that a widening circle of human compassion is indispensable to civilizational survival but is simultaneously a potential source of unimaginable private anguish. Regarding “America First,” we may recall Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists. Emersonian "high-thinkers" will soon need to inquire: How can we be released from the impending ideology of unqualified "America First," a zero-sum posture that would increase the prospects of war, terrorism and genocide.
Everything is interconnected. The whole world, legal relations included, represents a system: "The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature," says the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "no matter whom.... Each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others...."
Above all, Americans must understand that the state of our national union can never be better than the state of the wider world. This key truth obtains not "only" in reference to the more usual issues of war, peace and international law, but also to future instances of pandemic disease.
For the United States, an overarching objective must now be to protect the sacred dignity of each and every individual human being. This high-minded and ancient Jewish goal should now give more specific policy direction to the citizenry.[ Such indisputably good counsel could represent a welcome corrective to literal endorsements of "America First."
There is more. It will be easy to dismiss any such seemingly lofty recommendations for human dignity as silly, ethereal or "academic," but, in reality, there could never be any greater American naiveté than to champion the policy extremity of "everyone for himself." Not only is this demeaning extremity illogical and self-destructive, it is patently contrary to this nation's founding principles of Natural Law - principles expressed not only by Samuel von Pufendorf, but also by Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius and Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel.
Is there a properly "Jewish" orientation to public policy, one in some conceivable accord with Talmudic notions of human "oneness?" In essence, without a more suitable expansion of logic and empathy, we Americans would remain at the mercy of an incoherent world politics. Only by placing "Humanity First" could American citizenry make "America First." The latter, including avoidance of terrorism and genocide, is not possible without the former. But first there must be suitable and widespread "conviction."
America and the wider world can learn from Rabbi Avraham Kook and others that global unity is never something "outside;" it exists "inside," within all of us. A first task is to acknowledge this benevolent in-dwelling of both jurisprudential judgment and Jewish philosophy. The second is to adapt it as a progressively guiding source of world policy transformations. Unless we can all move far beyond the belligerent nationalism in simplisitic policies of “America First,” there will be no identifiable sanctuaries.
There is one last "linkage" to be noted. This is the critical nexus between macrocosm and microcosm, between world political processes and the singular person or "one." In the end, everything on this planet must depend upon the dignity, courage and "emancipation" of the individual human being.
Absolutely everything.
There is a hidden and vital issue here, one that has always "escaped" serious legal and philosophical analysis. This is the idea underlying Realpolitik thinking that various killings in world politics can hold an incomparable promise of immortality for the calculating perpetrator. According to playwright Eugene Ionesco, “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….Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.”
In his essay Who is Man? (1965), modern Jewish philosopher Abraham J. Heschel laments: "The emancipated man is yet to emerge." The remedy? Heschel asks all human beings to raise the following key questions with themselves:
"What is expected of me?"
"What is demanded of me?"
An obligation to resist Mass (Nietzsche would prefer "herd," Freud "horde," or Kierkegaard, "crowd") is taken by Heschel as prerequisite to any more sufficiently decent and peaceful "macrocosm." Thinking, like Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Jung, Freud, Ortega y'Gasset and certain others, that camouflage and concealment in the Mass must finally give way to "being-challenged-in-the- world, the Jewish philosopher clarifies our own law-based obligation to "get beyond belligerent nationalism." This is an obligation to demand a more consistently abiding respect for Law, Logic and Reason. They are all mutually reinforcing.
At the most practical level of national and global law-making, there could be no defensible purpose to remembering Rabbi Kook's "loftiness" of "soul." Nonetheless, such loftiness represents an exemplar of modern Jewish philosophy and could help variously receptive policymaking principals to modify their belligerent nationalism in time. Here, “in time” means before traditional geopolitics could produce another (and potentially unprecedented) wave of catastrophic war, terrorism or genocide.
Among other things, acknowledging Rabbi Kook's “high-thinking” in such foreign policymaking matters could offer Americans another chance for moral and legal elevations. More specifically, Jewish philosophy could help underscore the multiple infractions of “America First” and support both international law and the law of the United States. Sometimes, though inconspicuous, there is nothing more important than “dust.”
Prof. Louis René Beres (Ph.D. Princeton 1971)' twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). His writings can be found in The New York Times; The Atlantic; The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; The Hudson Review; JURIST; Modern Diplomacy; US News & World Report; World Politics (Princeton); Daily Princetonian; Yale Global; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); The Hill; The Jerusalem Post; Horasis (Zurich); BESA (Israel); INSS (Israel); International Security (Harvard); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); Israel Defense; and several dozen national and international law journals. Professor Beres is a seven-times contributor to the annual Oxford University Press Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence (Oxford University).is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. He was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.