A WORD ABOUT PEACE

And Foreign Affairs

I’m an avid reader of Foreign Affairs, a 101-year-old publication produced by the Council on Foreign Relations. Of all the magazines I subscribe to — New Yorker, Harpers, Atlantic, New York Review of Books, Smithsonian — I tend to hang onto Foreign Affairs the longest (each edition is 200+ pages) and read it most exhaustively. It features the voices of all sorts of government officials, advisors, and political scholars from various universities and think tanks around the world. Most of the writers tend to be internationalists (with an occasional nationalist and autocrat thrown in); among the Americans, there are centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans, “realists” (guided more by practical questions of political power than by moral sentiment), and people privy to inner-circle expertise and information. Reading Foreign Affairs is like watching The West Wing or Borgen — except these articles are the real article.These people shape world events.

The March-April volume, for example, has a piece that analyzes all of Russia’s military mistakes in Ukraine; another that details globalization marketplace policies that could effectively combat climate change (the authors use the vast, fast-paced success of the international IT industry as its analogue). A third article discusses the threats to American innovativeness (lack of long-term economic planning, aversion to failed experimentation, the stripping away of government resources). A fourth explores ways of containing the influence of Iran’s fundamentalist government following the collapse of the nuclear prollferation deal. Another describes China’s advances not only as the world’s factory but as a center of tech innovation.

In my ten years as a subscriber, however, I cannot remember reading an article about the ins and outs of making peace. All Foreign Affairs writers seem to take for granted a world full of antagonism, rivalry, and periodic war, which they analyze from various useful perspectives. None of them discuss what might be necessary to break international deadlocks and build actual peace.

For example, none of the writers, in my memory has ever discussed in Foreign Affairs the inner workings of the United Nations and analyzed why this international body is so ineffectual. I’ve never read a discussion of how peacemaking leaders such as the pope, the Dalai Lama, the General-Secretary of the United Nations, or the Elders, actually wield their influence, as in, What can we learn from them about reconciliation? I’ve never read an interview with a peacemaker, or a gender analysis of peacemaking, or an analysis of trauma and its impact on history. I’ve never read in Foreign Affairs about the Four C’s of peacemaking: contact, cooperation, communication, conciliation.

How about practical peacemaking strategies? I’d love to read a call for an offspring exchange: that the leaders of rivalrous nations should be required to send their favorite son or daughter to live in the “enemy” country for as long as those leaders are in power (as in the last season of Fargo, in which opposing gangsters traded their sons). Hunter Biden goes to Beijing; Ella Emhoff (Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter) goes to Moscow; Xi Mingze goes to Washington; Katerina Putin goes to New York. At the very least, this makes a nuclear attack on each nation’s major cities highly unlikely.

Now take it to the next step: Yesterday, I heard New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy say that he was going to lock negotiators in the Rutgers University strike into a room and not let them out until they have some kind of a settlement. When has that fundamental negotiators’ principle been applied to world affairs? With China and the U.S. locked into a major rivalry, their most influential people should have more contact, constant contact, not less; more exchanges of people, not less; more joint enterprises, not less. Instead, we have, as Thomas Friedman described the U.S.-China relationship in Friday’s New York Times, “two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole.”

I’ve also read very little in Foreign Affairs about various countries’ racial and racist cultures, and how that might affect their foreign policies. I know a lot about my own country’s racism (though it is rarely counted as influencing American foreign policy in Foreign Affairs), but surely other powerful countries also view the world through a racial/racist lens — which must be understood before that lens can be removed and peace can be pursued.

Moving beyond Foreign Affairs, when I do internet searches about “peace studies,” I find a fairly laughable smattering of academic programs that lead to such careers as “not-for-profit and advocacy organizations. businesses (e.g., handling cross-cultural training), hospitals, educational institutions, governmental agencies and departments” (this from a drop-down answer to “What can I do with a Ph.D in peace and conflict studies?”). The field seems notably lightweight, utopian, and unmoored from institutions of real power.

Which is very sad, but what else is new when it comes to humanity?

If you have novel ideas about peacemaking (such as the offspring exchange), please share them with me at lawrencebush@earthlink.net.