If US citizens truly believed that all persons are created equal…

The US’s Founding Fathers famously  declared that
” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are
created equal…”

Our national population makes up somewhere under 5% of the world’s
total.  Each US citizen, on average, was responsible in 2004 for
the puffing out of 20 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a national
total of  5.91 billion metric tons.)  Actually, that last
link, which is to an official US Department of Energy database, understates the real dimension of the problem, since
it’s an Excel file that charts only CO2 emissions from the consumption
and flaring of fossil fuels– leaving out other causes of CO2 emissions. But no matter.

So if all 6.3 billion people in the world really are equal, then each
should also have the “right” to emit their own 20 metric tons of CO2
into the atmosphere every year… Right?

That would come to 126 billion metric tons…  Nearly five times the current
world emission rate.

Last fall, the UK government’s chief economist, Nicholas Stern, pulled
together the best information available anywhere on human-induced
climate and the foreseeable costs of (a) not doing anything about it,
and (b) doing something to truly bring the problem under control. 
The scientists he consulted said that worldwide CO2 emissions need to
be brought down beneath five
billion metric tons a year if very damaging, potentially speciescidal, human-induced climate change
through CO2 emissions is to be ended.

George W. Bush asserts the “right” of the US to emit just as much CO2
as it pleases… But the Founding Fathers told us that all men [and
women] are created equal.  Can both claims be upheld?  If we
renege on one of them, which should it be?

… Okay, here’s another similar conundrum.  I don’t need to
repeat the famous (and in my view extremely important) claim made by
our nation’s Founding Fathers.

So in 2005, the US spent $1,637 on military goods and service for each
citizen of the Republic.  (Next highest per-capita rates among
significant world powers were France and the UK, neither of which spent
more than $860 per head.)  Those figures are all from my copy of
the IISS’s Military Balance 2007.

So if every country in the world asserted a “right” to engage in
per-capita military spending at the same rate as the US, then total
world military spending would be $10.3 trillion… 
Instead of $1.2 trillion, which was what it actually was in 2005.

And instead of the world having just twelve US carrier
battle groups and a few other nations’ naval formations rushing around its
oceans, there would be 228 additional carrier battle groups also clogging up
the seas.  (Do you have any idea how much sea a whole carrier
battle group occupies?)  And many of those additional CBGs would likely be
steaming around as close to our coastlines as our CBGs
like to go to the coastlines of, for example, China or Iran… 
And if this whole global hyper-arming business were really evened out
on a population-proportional basis, then 48 of those CBGs would indeed be
Chinese.

Somehow, the whole world has gotten itself into this quite
unsustainable position whereby US military power has become quite
disproprtionate to any notions of human fairness or equality.  And
what’s more, this bloated US military is not actually very good any more at winning (and
holding) any worthwhile strategic goals.  That’s the dirty little
secret of US military power, that has been exposed more than ever
before by the still-unfolding, horribly tragic debacle in Iraq.

(Just as Israel’s much-vaunted military power was incapable of winning
any worthwhile strategic goals in Lebanon, last year.)

The world has changed.  It actually started changing back in
August 1945, which was the world’s inaugural (and ultimate) “shock and
awe” moment. In 1946, the brilliant strategic thinker Bernard Brodie
looked back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wrote “Thus far the chief
purpose of our military establishment has been to
win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can
have almost no other useful purpose.”  The Cold War dulled the
impact of Brodie’s basic message somewhat for the next 45 years–except
that, of course, the strategy of war-deterrence that he
advocated was indeed the organizing leitmotif of the whole Cold
War… 

But what we are seeing now, I think, is that Brodie’s message applied
much more widely than “just” to the Soviet Union.  And we should
remember, anyway, that when he expressed his important judgment about
the need to focus on war-aversion, the Soviets still didn’t have any
nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the return of Brodie-ism is the subject of another JWN post I’m
kind of planning… Under the title, perhaps, of “US militarism: The
God that failed.”  The point of this present post, though, is to
call my fellow Amurrcans back to some deep thinking about whether we
really do still hold to the ideal of human equality… and what that
should mean for the kinds of policy that our country pursues today.

(Important to note: When the Founding Fathers talked about people being
created equal they notably did not restrict that to US
citizens. They did, unfortunately, restrict it to “men”– and of
course, they did not at the time extend it in practice to non-white men or even in
any meaningful way to white men who were not also property
holders.  But still, the fact that they talked about all “men”
being equal, and not only the citizens of the then-colonies, was
important for their argument at the time.  And it is equally
important for my argument– my call to conscience on the issue of human
equality– today.)