"If we scale up this behavior of framing our conflicts as a struggle between “good vs evil”, we find ourselves engaged in war."
--Geopolitical conflict isn't a therapy problem. It's about which systems of governance have a future and which don't. We have Roman ruins, but not Celtic. We have many more Greek and Roman ruins than Persian and Etruscan. Don't try visiting a Carthaginian villa.
Only since 1945 has humanity progressed from its usual legacy mode of empire: no market or resource access without direct sovereign rule. The American empire is the first in history to decouple resource and market access from direct sovereign rule.
Current geopolitical conflict between the American hegemon and China and Russia is not a therapy or human relations problem, but about which model will prevail. Will market and resource access be linked to sovereign control of a territory or decoupled from direct sovereignty? From the neolithic revolution until 1945 empire, the modus operandi of human civilization, meant the former. The American empire invented the latter: indirect rule through alliance networks living under a common collective security umbrella with guaranteed free trade and navigation. All European states but the Eurasian USSR, through the lesson of defeat in colonial wars, then shed their empires and formed the shared sovereignty EU. The no future empires included allies and former enemies:
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Germany, Italy. The current holdouts clinging to an outdated business model of imperial hegemony: China and Russia, the Kodak and Blockbuster of empire. Bankrupt walking dead businesses with no future rarely recognize reality.
A de-escalation skill set is utterly useless in a conflict between irreconcilable opposites that involves good vs evil:
Nanjing vs Bushido Japan's officers' beheading contests 1937
Sobibor and The Warsaw ghetto, 1943
The Polish Home Army vs Germany, 1944
Deported Crimean Tatars vs Stalin's USSR, 1944
Georgia, Petersburg and Richmond, 1864-65.
The Cherokee vs Andrew Jackson's USA, Trail of Tears
Spain, 1936-39
Iran's murderous mullahs vs teenage protestors now.
Afghan women vs the Taliban.
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia vs the USSR, 1940 and 1991.
Ukraine now.
Listen to Frederick Douglass:
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Douglass' tyrants--Confederate slavers, Stalin, Hitler, Putin, Khamanei, Kim Jong Un--and their mafia with a flag gangster regimes--need Douglass' demolition through resistance strategy, not therapy.
