The new movie Oppenheimer has caused many people to rededicate themselves to the goal of achieving an international ban on nuclear weapons. But that’s never going to happen. There is no reasonable possibility whatsoever that the U.S. national-security establishment (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA) would ever agree to dismantle its nuclear stockpile, especially since there would be no way to guarantee that foreign regimes would do the same.
Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer
Does that mean that the world is consigned to living forever under the specter of all-out, life-destroying nuclear war? No! But to bring an end to the specter of nuclear war, what is needed is not political agreements between the governments of the world but rather mutual, friendly, and interdependent relationships between the people of the world that would significantly reduce the prospect of nuclear war.
In other words, there is a big difference between governments and nations. We need to focus less on persuading governments to enter into political agreements to destroy nuclear stockpiles and more on creating friendships and mutual interdependencies among the people of the world, which would reduce the incentive for nuclear war.
The United States could lead the way in this endeavor by taking the following four critically important steps:
First, the U.S. government should cease all interventionist activity in the world. That includes invasions, occupations, coups, foreign aid, alliances (including those with dictatorial regimes), sanctions, and embargoes. The U.S. government should simply leave the world alone. When bad things happen in the world, U.S. interventionism only makes them worse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans.
As Martin Luther King correctly pointed out, the U.S. government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. All that violence and the threat of violence gives both foreign regimes and foreign groups the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons and to use them against the United States. Examples: North Korea and Iran. That incentive would evaporate as soon as the United States re-adopted its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism.
Second, the U.S. should dismantle its national-security state form of governmental structure and restore its founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. The national-security state form of governmental structure is the driving force behind foreign interventionism and the U.S. forever wars and perpetual international crises. It is also what has made the U.S. government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
Third, the United States should permanently liberate, preferably through constitutional amendment, the American people to freely travel anywhere in the world and trade with whomever they want. This is where the lifting of sanctions, embargoes, and travel/spending restrictions comes into play. An abandonment of the passport system would be another great step toward reestablishing the fundamental rights of freedom of travel, freedom of association, freedom of trade, and economic liberty.
Fourth, the United States should adopt a policy of genuine open borders, which would enable foreign citizens to freely enter the United States to visit, tour, open businesses, invest, or work. They would be free to retain their citizenship. There would be no more immigration central planning and no more immigration quotas or visa requirements. There would simply be the free movements of goods, services, and people across borders. A genuine system of open borders would go a long way toward establishing friendships and mutually dependent relationships among Americans and the people of the world.
There is no guarantee, of course, that other nations would follow America’s lead, but there is a good chance that many, if not most, of them would. By taking these four critically important steps, the United States would be leading the world toward mutual friendships and interdependent relationships that would significantly reduce the incentive to resort to nuclear weapons and, for that matter, to international wars.