The American expression, “time is money,” sits at the core of United States culture. It doesn’t just mean that you can put a price on time “spent” or that you shouldn’t waste time. The copulative use of the verb “to be” in the proverb asserts a semantic equivalence between the two ideas of money and time.

Time is money, but equally money is time. Don’t believe me? Just ask Warren Buffett, a man who marvels at the miraculous nature of compound interest, representing the perfect unification of money and time. Albert Einstein called compound interest “the eighth wonder of the world” even while expressing doubts about the reality of quantum mechanics.

Because time has such a special place in US culture, it’s instructive to see how it may influence discussions both trivial and grave. Take the topic of nuclear weapons, for example. Most other cultures see the very idea of possessing a nuclear arsenal as an existential problem. Most nations question whether nuclear weapons should even be allowed to exist. Americans, in contrast — especially those who have the power to make policy — focus on the real question: how those weapons need to be managed over time.

In an article for the publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jack O’Doherty, presents in some depth the current debate among Washington’s military strategists concerning nuclear policy. As you read the article, bear in mind that the nation’s citizens have not been consulted on the options outlined, nor are they likely even to be aware of them. No politicians covered by the popular media have even alluded to this question. The outcome of the debate will nevertheless affect the life of every person on Earth.

Here are two significant quotes from the article:

“The United States has begun a long overdue modernization of its nuclear arsenal, and it’s essential to understand the purpose of these acquisitions.”

 “It’s time for the American nuclear policy community to have a long-overdue conversation about what, prescriptively, US nuclear weapons are for. Deterrence, yes, but in what form?”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Long-overdue:

So urgent that a decision must be made without the time-consuming effort of analyzing all the possible and probable consequences, even if they point towards global catastrophe.

Contextual note

Most of us learned the meaning of the adjective overdue in the context of checking out books from the library, when we were learning to read. Our parents taught us to be careful about respecting dates, to avoid the dreadful consequence of a monetary fine. Later in life, many people discovered that the word could carry a slightly more serious level of urgency, when it came to paying rent to a landlord or alimony to a divorced spouse. Too much “overdueing it” could land you in court.

Using the epithet, as O’Doherty does, when discussing nuclear arsenals clearly takes us to another level. One might think that when discussing any nation’s nuclear strategy, we would be invited to entertain a full spectrum of choices, starting with total disarmament and extending across the spectrum to the idea of covering entire regions with a strike capacity designed as a nuclear noose.

O’Doherty’s article informs us that, at least in the US context, the spectrum has now been conveniently reduced to a binary choice. He presents them as practically the equivalent of a Dodge City-style “nuclear showdown.” Here is how he describes the “two schools of thought.”

“The development of nuclear weapons started an inflexible and entangled debate between what—to borrow almost anachronistic language—may be described as the “nuclear revolution” and the “nuclear superiority” schools of thought. The former insists that mutual vulnerability (from which deterrence stability is derived) has revolutionized international competition by making wars between great powers essentially impossible. The latter, meanwhile, contends that the Pentagon should embrace nuclear warfighting postures revolving around a counterforce targeting doctrine—that is, shooting first in a preemptive strike to eliminate an opponent’s nuclear weapons before they can be launched (this is defined by its proponents as the only conceivable way to win a nuclear war).”

The second “school of thought” seems to reflect the philosophy infamously deployed by George W. Bush to justify launching his invasion of Iraq in 2003. Because we didn’t know what Saddam Hussein might do with his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, we sure as hell had to make sure that he would never get the chance.

In that scenario, we invaded and declared “mission accomplished.” In this scenario, however, it isn’t about invading. It’s about launching a nuclear attack once we are convinced sufficient suspicions exist to make it necessary. Suspicions of the sort expressed by CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 to President Bush: “It’s a slam dunk.” Could that kind of pre-emptive reasoning and the act that followed take place again? If O’Dohery’s second “school of thought” were to win out, the answer will be presumably, yes.

Historical note

In retrospect, everyone notes that the fall of the Soviet Union marked a major turning point in history. It ushered in the unipolar world, an order that lasted for most of the next three decades, in which the US dominated the planet’s economic activity and its most significant political events. International Relations guru John Mearsheimer cites 2017 as the moment when that suddenly appearing unipolar world gave way to a new multipolar world that is still taking and changing shape as we write.

The significance of a unipolar world can be summarized in the oft-repeated idea of a “rules-based order,” understood as a set of behavioral standards defined and enforced by a unique superpower: the US. The existence of a unipolar hegemon “simplified” some of the reasoning about issues arising between nations. Everyone in the “free world” was now “free” to align with the policies of Washington, knowing that it would put them “on the right side of (unipolar) history.”

Some people developed the habit of calling this a “normative order.” The idea of normative appears to embrace several things:

• standards of behavior widely accepted and expected in the international community,
• moral guidelines that shape decisions and actions, such as the just war theory,
• international laws and treaties that formalize these norms and principles, such as the Geneva Conventions or the United Nations Charter
• and finally, cultural values.

That dog’s dinner leaves a lot to choose from, to say nothing about the fact that experts in cultural communication will tell you that identifying any set of behaviors as “normative” could only be a fool’s errand.

Even while the idea of “normative” carries a lot of positive connotations, one of the consequences many people have noticed — and which I recently discussed with former Swiss ambassador Jean-Daniel Ruch — has been the marginalization, or frankly discrediting, of the basic tool of diplomacy: dialogue. When one has a “normative order” to refer to, it makes it easy to cut short any dialogue by referring to the rules of that order. This trend has had the effect of producing a world of “forever wars” and never-to-be-realized “ceasefires.” I put this last term in quotes to highlight the degree of meaninglessness it has effectively achieved. They say time is the great healer. Dialogue is an even better one… and it saves time!

To sum up, the history of the past 35 years offered us the hope of living under a normative order that has never managed to exist. It has also supplied the explanation of why it could never exist. The answer is simple: the enforced absence of dialogue and the death of diplomacy.

In this year of multiple elections, with the most monumental one expected in November, is there any real chance of seeing a new world order built not of normativity, but of dialogue? Some of us still cling to that hope. On that note, I leave you with one remark in O’Doherty’s article concerning the “dialogue” between the two “schools of thought:”

“These competing perspectives share the halls of power but rarely talk to each other. Each accuses the other of entertaining imaginary empirical pretensions, of a lazy misreading of history, and of celebrating theories compromised by their own basic premise.”

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.