Pax Americana

I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy¹

Throughout the twentieth century, despite the shadow cast by US capitalism and dominion, Americans stood confident that their country was grounded by values and commitments that rejected tyranny and oppression in favor of the impartial rule of law and individual self-determination. Progress toward realiz­ing these values was uneven and halting. But for American citizens, hopeful immigrants, and foreigners inspired by these ideals, the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence perpetuated the Enlightenment ethos of self­emancipation. A Pax Americana could be envisioned to be inseparable from the American Dream of inclusive wealth creation “with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”²

It goes without saying that one person’s claim to freedom cannot, without contradiction, involve denying another’s equal claim. However nostalgically one may remember the moral high ground of World War II or the prolific power of mid-century “made in USA” industry, the twenty-first century social contract is blatantly antithetical to an inclusive vision for prosperity. Strategic

¹ J.

² James Thruslow Adams, The Epic of America (Little, Brown, 1931), 214-215.

285 rationality and the Prisoner’s Dilemma model for social relations that is its central logical paradox recommend both political domination and economic chicanery.

Game theory is ubiquitous. It dominates academic curricula and economic models, and its application spans market practices, institutional design, and public policy implementation. Strategic rationality is so much part of our contemporary worldview that it is intertwined with the evolving meaning of the word “cynical.” Game theory, like late twentieth-century cynicism, has three moments. The first captures the initial meaning of ancient Greek cynicism: using reason to understand the world to live in accordance with its true nature and thus strive to achieve happiness, or eudemonia. The second captures the latent anxiety that the world may not be forgiving, and that human nature and thermodynamics may inevitably reflect endless competition and the gradual heat death of the universe.^[694] At this stage in the 1970s, neoliberal theorists understood their challenge to be to accept the worst but still try to find a way to reconstruct the positive system of classical liberalism in the hope of building a mutually prosperous basis for capitalism and democracy. The eventual end of the Cold War seemed to offer this prospect. All that was needed was for the baby boom generation to rise to the occasion of this optimistic future symbo­lized by the Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20,1969. Yet instead, the optimism soon faded. President Richard Milhous Nixon mired the country in impeach­ment proceedings as a result of his paranoid excesses, destroying the public’s faith in government. The “three strikes” penal reform initiative resulted in a mass incarceration state. The peace dividend that was supposed to follow the Cold War never appeared, giving way instead to successive wars and mounting debt.

From this perspective, returning to classical liberalism is not an option. Its ethical compass of voluntary self-restraint in respecting others’ right to exist is contrary to one’s prerogative to survive and propagate. The commons and the public are antiquated relics beset with crisis and tragedy. The Enlightenment equipoise between a private sphere for expressing self-identity in faith or with­out and a public realm that encompasses both commons and all private posses­sions, with the full acknowledgment of the zero-sum quality of physical property yet the belief in the positive-sum benefit of security in ownership, has vanished. In its place stands a single metric of value that treats all human experience as commensurable and reducible to an individual’s willingness and ability to pay for goods and outcomes, regardless of how close a person lives to the level of subsistence, or even below. The rule of law, as well as individuals’ equality before it, is a nostalgic artifact with mythopoeic dimensions of an Atlantian era transcending the brutal reality that in a neoliberal regime, laws and their enforcement are open to the highest bidder: “to each according to his threat advantage.”^[695] The modern Third Estate, informing public debate and effective citizenry, is in free fall because information is valued as a strategic commodity and not an indispensable public good.

This book has focused on the pivotal role of the invention of nuclear weapons in the neoliberal turn. Missiles and bombs, no matter how deadly, provide no security unless they are integrated into a war plan that coherently advances and effectively executes the goals of a sovereign nation.

Rational choice provided a means of performing national security via commanding and controlling a vast nuclear arsenal in accordance with the principles of rationality. It helped provide a seemingly rational order to the irrational arms race. This exercise of sovereignty soon permeated all levels of social order, as game theory became the preferred means to describe, enact, and explain purposive agency. Analysts embraced strategies and models used to address a worst-case scenario requiring urgent and painstaking attention as the best means to understand civil society, markets, government, and even interpersonal relations. The prerogatives of national security were integrated into the most mundane of interactions. A social contract based on consent and voluntary compliance yielded to the neoliberal regime of de facto pos­session, coercive bargaining, ex post consent, the reduction of individual worth to willingness and ability to pay, and single criterion accounting that reduces all phenomena and entities to one finite commensurable source of value.