Older than we may have realized.
Older than we may have realized.
Thanks to the miracle of social media I learned today that Ben Carson has rolled out a “comprehensive plan” to defeat ISIS and rid the world of the scourge of ISIS and global Islamic jihad once and for all. Given that foreign policy is widely considered Carson’s weakest of weak points, I figured I would give it a read to see if he’s stepped up his game any.
Yeah, not so much.
I could go through it all for you (all six pages, two of which are full-page portraits of the humble doctor), picking each bit apart and showing that his ideas are: 1) impossibly vague; 2) uninformed by any knowledge of the region, its history, or cultures; 3) disconnected from any understanding of military strategy or actual diplomacy; 4) vows to do what the Obama administration is already doing; 5) empty platitudes; or 6) some combination of all of the above.
Why though? If you’re inclined to vote for him for president because he seems to be a nice guy who isn’t tainted by politics then nothing I write here is going to change your mind. You’re also highly unlikely to be reading my blog …
If you care about having a serious debate about American foreign, the unseriousness of Carson’s big strategy reveal will just frustrate and annoy you.
But if the masochist in you wants to check it out to take in the sheer audacity of its badness, then by all means, click away.
Note — This post is by Nicole Diroff, a student in the Honors College at Oakland University double majoring in philosophy and cinema studies. Over the next few months, students in my course, International Relations on Film, will be contributing posts to the blog reflecting on the movies we are watching in class. Nicole’s piece is the first, presented here with only minor editing.
“What is force?”
That was the question asked by Maj. Gen. Robert Ford when he was asked whether or not the shootings that took place on January 30, 1972, in Northern Ireland were justified, as depicted in Paul Greengrass’ film Bloody Sunday. The use of force, and what force actually is, is not only a large theme in the movie, but this question is also essential to answering some of our own problems in 2016 America.
First, even though “What is force?” is a valid question that should be answered, using it in response to a question about the shooting of a peaceful protest is completely unfair. (You can watch the entire scene from the film in the clip below.)
Asking “What is force?” in this situation completely absolves the British army from any responsibility for killing these protesters, and further can justify any action they do. Because, if they do not know what force is, there is nothing stopping them from going overboard.
However, force can be defined. And it should be divided into physical force and moral force.
Physical force is a clear concept, and it can easily be seen in the movie. It is clear that the troops attacked the protesters with violence when that level of violence was unnecessary. The paratroopers shot randomly into the crowd, and even after a ceasefire order was issued, they did not stop. A crowd of protesters ran from the shootings, but soldiers shot them from behind and even shot at them while they were down.
In this case, the question is not about what physical force actually is, but rather whether or not the force used was excessive. In short, yes, because the protesters did not pose a real threat to the troops, and also because they willfully shot at civilians.
Things change a bit when moral force is brought into the conversation, and this is also where America should reflect upon its own situation that has been happening for the past year and a half.
Moral force and physical force can be on two ends of a spectrum of force, but moral force can also be a requirement for physical force. Police officers and the military are often seen as the embodiment of a moral force, thus, when they use physical force, it must be for a good reason. However, even if they can be considered a moral force, that does not mean that society cannot be a moral arbiter itself.
The police and the military should not be the source of morality, but rather enforcers of a morality that society has already set for itself. As the topic of police brutality becomes increasingly more relevant in America, more and more people continue to state that they support the police, not criminals.
Unfortunately, this is an oversimplification of the problem. It’s easy to claim a moral person does not support criminals, but a support of criminals is not the same as not supporting the ways in which those criminals are brought to justice. Maj. Gen. Ford says in the film that everything that was done by the British Army that day was to re-establish law and order, but if the massacre of civilians is what is considered law and order, perhaps society should reevaluate what they consider to be moral.
The film did have one other example of moral force, and that was force shown through the peaceful marchers. There were certainly some in the march who became less than peaceful, but the clear objective of the march was to protest for civil rights in the name of peace.
However, as stated above, moral force seems to be some sort of prerequisite for physical force, and Bloody Sunday explores this concept in a different form, as the way the military or police would. The protesters tried to be peaceful, but the nonviolent Northern Ireland civil rights movement was killed that day along with the 13 civilians shot down on the streets by British paratroopers.
At the end of the film, Ivan Cooper, the Protestant member of parliament who was one of the organizers of the march, says at a press conference that as a result of the killings, hundreds of able-bodied men were now motivated to join the Irish Republican Army. The use of physical force has led to a circular aggression, in which each group brings violence against the other, all for the sake of trying to achieve peace.
Donald Trump’s critics and rivals have it all wrong. In his boycott of tonight’s debate hosted by Fox News, a product of his ongoing feud with the network, the GOP frontrunner isn’t showing fear or weakness, though that’s not how Fox itself sees it:
In a Tuesday statement to Business Insider, a spokesperson for the network mused about whether global leaders would be fair to a potential President Trump.
“We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings,” the Fox spokesperson said.
Slate’s Jim Newell was particularly blunt:
Opting out of the last debate before presidential voting begins, because the network hosting the debate issued a snarky statement, is a very big risk. Not only because, on first glance, he looks like a petulant coward.
But they’re wrong. Trump isn’t displaying petulance, cowardice, or weakness. Instead he’s channeling the principles first committed to writing nearly 3,000 years ago by the Athenian general and historian Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the foundational documents of the realist school of international relations.
Trump is acting from what he believes to be a position of superior power, and as Thucydides wrote, and Trump knows, the powerful make their own rules. Is it right that Trump walk away from a debate he had committed to in what his detractors consider a fit of pique? In “The Melian Dialogue” portion of his History, Thucydides gives us the answer:
You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
As Trump sees it, he’s the one with the power. He’s the one who has tapped in to the anger and frustrations of the Republican grassroots. He’s the one who can seemingly say anything, no matter how outrageous, and see his polling numbers rise. Trump boasted to an ecstatic crowd of supporters at a rally in Iowa on Saturday, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” That’s how he sees his power.
From where he sits, Trump can with confidence declare that Fox News needs him on that debate stage, with the ratings he drives and the revenue that he generates, far more than he needs them. After all, as Thucydides observed, the powerful cooperate only when it is in their own selfish interests to do so. Trump, who can dominate the news cycle like no candidate before him, has no interest in helping Fox draw viewers. Which is exactly what he told them:
… as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. Fox News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts.
Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and Fox News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn’t play games.
Trump does not fear the power of Fox News and so has no reason to give it what it wants or to seek the network’s good will. Having taken this stand, Trump is unlikely to back down. Thucydides explains why:
No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power … If any maintain their independence it is because they are strong, and that if we do not molest them it is because we are afraid.
To back down, to compromise with Fox, to give it what it wants when he, not the network, holds all the cards, would be a demonstration of weakness on Trump’s part. A man in his position can’t afford to go down that road.
Meanwhile, political observers, the Republican establishment, and the remaining contenders in the GOP field, cling to the hope that the Trump bubble will eventually burst, that the man will finally take it one step too far, that voters will sober up, turn away, and bring his improbable rise crashing back to earth. But Thucydides offers them a blunt warning:
Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty, as compared with those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious.
Before a single vote has been cast, Trump has more support than any Republican in the race. He doesn’t need the establishment’s money or its endorsements. He dismisses the criticisms of the punditocracy. No rival has gone after him directly and come out on top.
Has Trump finally overplayed his hand? Even the powerful can miscalculate. But I for one am no longer willing to bet against him.
Not yet.