One reason fruitless fights occur is that language — which is to say concepts — adequate to discuss and settle disputes is not present in either party to the conflict.
A normal person, for example, will find no way to discuss the consequences with an aggressive and unlearned defective.
Awareness is present that customary conceptual-discursive facilities at scales macro and micro, and just among normal persons, are unable today to solve problems facing individuals and nations. We’ve walked, so to speak, from familiar land into unfamiliar water still dressed for hiking. Where are the boats, we ask?
Note these corroborative statements by Oleg Barabanov at Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club:
Values determine policy. How true is this statement? The dynamics of international relations in the 21st century is moving from the traditional balance of power and the promotion of interests to the normative and value-based conditionality of foreign policy actions. Therefore, moral attitudes are beginning to play an increasing, and sometimes even prevailing role in world diplomacy and foreign policy struggle. The value factor is of particular importance for the perception of foreign policy by society in various countries.
Moreover, strategies to promote values have become of key importance, as have policies based primarily, if not exclusively, on values, and only then on interests. The popularity of the concept of “normative power” is a testament to this.
The policy of global promotion of values and normative foundations of politics evokes a revisionist response from disaffected powers in the face of modern geopolitical struggles. And as this struggle intensifies, their value and normative revisionism begins to increasingly complement the traditional geopolitical revisionism of these countries. Different values and different normative attitudes associated with them are now becoming an increasingly tangible obstacle to dialogue between different centres of power in the world. Therefore, mutual semantic misunderstanding is now becoming a key problem in international relations.
In recent years, the value-normative agenda has gone beyond the framework of traditional geopolitics. The Intensification of green transformation and the global energy transition, a sharp strengthening of “biopower“ in the COVID-19 era, conflicts in sports and Olympic politics, the acuteness of questions about racial and gender equality, about the rights of migrants, about different understanding of historical memory – all this directly affects the rapid evolution of global values in the modern world. All these critical issues will be the focus of the Valdai Club’s expert programme.
This programme continues the Morality and Law Programme:
The dynamics of world politics in the 21st century have shifted more and more from the traditional balance of power to the normative and value conditionality of foreign policy actions. Therefore, moral attitudes have begun to play an increasing and sometimes prevailing role over law in world diplomacy and foreign policy struggles.
Of particular importance is the moral-value factor for the perception by society of foreign policy in various countries. Therefore, the problems of moral relativism have come to the fore, amid value revisionism and the normative conditionality of foreign policy. They also affect divergent versions of historical memory among different states and societies.
Various moral and ethical approaches to world politics lead to the fact that actors increasingly speak languages which different semantics, even when everyone speaks the same professional English. The reason lies in the various value orientations and public expectations of foreign policy in various societies.
Therefore, mutual semantic misunderstanding is now becoming a key problem in international relations. The dialectic of morality and law is clearly manifest in global efforts to combat climate change and, more broadly, in all environmental issues. In actively developing global environmental ethics, new environmental values pose a serious challenge to the established principles of economic and social governance.
In this regard, climate issues may be at the forefront of discussions about the rules for the functioning of world politics, the parameters of the future world order, as well as moral and ethical acceptability.
In such conditions, appeal to law is bootless, as is appeal to custom or tradition. Law and custom are created after basic needs of food, clothing, space, shelter, and safety are satisfied.
The purpose of a nation’s armed forces is to provide an expanse of time, a duration, during which the nation’s citizens may provision themselves with basic needs: food, clothing, space, shelter, and safety. A nation’s armed forces then hold the winds of reality, the wilds of nature at bay — minimizing VUCA — so the nation may grow steadily more able to survive natural pressures by creating assets alongside and integrated with her military one.
A nation comes up — and stays up — around her armed forces. Then she builds more supports to maintain her comfort, in particular diplomacy, finance, and the engineering arts, the last deriving from necessity in the military arts themselves.
Now today in The USA, the chief threat to national opportunity is private armies, armed forces raised and operated outside the command and control — and more importantly, the purpose — of The US Armed Forces. Nuclear war less threatens The USA than do private armies. Nuclear war would cause less damage to The USA than private armies already have done. A nation hurts from the inside out, not from the outside in.
Private armies operate outside the common good and inside assumptions of private and general lawlessness. These armies are undemocratic with respect to public norms and values. Guns are less useful than the common good supported by ancient and settled law.
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Armed forces operating inside a nation but not integrated with her citizen-authorized armed forces fit the US Constitution’s profile of a domestic enemy. They are a clear and present danger to the nation, to the nation’s constituent jurisdictions, and to her sovereignty.
Today, in addition to innumerable oligarchs and corporations, most US federal departments and agencies, and many state and local ones, operate a private army on their own behalf. That’s a lot of private armies and a sign of chaos. This means people comprising these departments and agencies have guilty consciences, fearing retribution from citizens whose interests they know they are meant to serve but have not, do not, and do not want to serve. It also means these people see themselves as perpetual rulers rather than temporary stewards. Who needs an army if you do not plan to stay in office indefinitely?
The only legitimate — and therefore allowable — armed force in a country is her military force, who are approved by her citizens’ representatives in the federal government, and state and local police forces, who are approved by her citizens in those jurisdictions. Private armies — including those summoned by government officials to protect themselves by attacking their enemies — have no legitimacy in a nation. This means, among other things, that private armies have no legitimacy trying to unmake a nation, as some today are doing at the behest of US federal officials who themselves occupy offices illegitimately.
- In this last regard, CIA and their private armies — SEAL Team 6, others — DEA, and FBI come to mind. These agencies are private armies serving themselves and MICIMATT. In addition, they cooperate with major and minor international, multinational criminal organizations inside and outside The USA. They do business with them, as seen at least since The Iran-Contra Affair. The agencies supplement their official budgets with lucrative business and criminal operations.
An order of business for US Armed Forces under a genuine POTUS’ authority is physically and operationally to strip off the private armies from The USA, to include from off her domestic and foreign affairs activities. This includes private armies owned by oligarchs and corporations as well as private armies owned by US departments and agencies of government.
The Armed Forces of The USA are the normative spiritual and moral power of The USA. They set the tone of Americans, whether for faith and happiness or fear and sorrow.
To the agenda of Americans engaged in re-founding The USA, add stripping private armies out of American life to restoring the professional guilds and making friends with India and Russia.
Principle I
Principle II
Principle III
By Artists M and F Graham
At Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, India
