Keys of This Blood (62 page)

The suppleness of that mask affords him almost endless opportunities to overcome Western suspiciousness. Permitting the apparent “democratization” of the USSR's former satellites, allowing (almost) a thousand
flowers of criticism and self-opinion to bloom in public in the Soviet Union, apparently withdrawing from Afghanistan, opening up Moscow to the golden arches of McDonald's—the list is endless—Gorbachev seems to be giving endless pledges of his good faith and his attachment to those “human values” the West touts as its very own norms of acceptable human morality. In the meanwhile, the Soviet president offers his Western counterparts the heady wine of fresh markets, banking and brokerage and joint venture possibilities, and an end to the yearly waste of dollars on the defensive and offensive shield of the West.

The secularist approach to human problems that is shared by both sides has placed them both in this precarious position. For what secularism kills off is the force of moral obligation to an authority believed and held to be outside the human conscience and to all human consciences, superior to the human conscience as such, and provided with sanctions to enforce the moral law or penalize its violation. Secularism allows of no such absolute. “One cannot but regret,” John Paul stated quite trenchantly during his January 1990 annual state-of-the-world address to the Vatican diplomatic corps of 120 ambassadors to the Holy See, “the deliberate absence of every transcendental moral reference in governing the so-called developed societies.” That one word “deliberate” evoked a momentary buzz of comments among the otherwise decorous body of diplomats. God and his moral law, John Paul was telling them bluntly, have been deliberately omitted from your councils of state.

There is, therefore, a spiritual blindness, a myopia in things of the spirit and of God—this is John Paul's conclusion. It gets worse, according to the Pontiff. For that profundity of blindness to the moral dimension of human life brings on, as a consequence, a darkening of the mind's clarity, so that the practical and highly important judgments Americans have to make when tangling with a Master Juggler of Gorbachev's skill will be off the mark, awry, and unbalanced by unimportant elements. The February 1990 marriage of Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to Roald Sagdeyev, adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, evoked in millions the conviction that “the Cold War is really over.” Maureen Dowd, reporting the day's events in Moscow on February 7, 1990, when the Kremlin Politburo decided to relax its monopoly on Soviet political power, wrote in
The New York Times
that in Washington that day, “some people were thunderstruck. Others were numb, unable to absorb one more remarkable blow to Communism…. So today the reaction was mostly muted wonder at the events in Moscow.”

Unknowingly, Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and President Bush, put her finger on the effect of that darkened perception
of the American mind. “We may have exhausted our capacity for surprise and delight when we watched children in Tiananmen Square quoting Jefferson and children in East Berlin taking pick-axes to the Berlin Wall as East German guards smiled for the camera.”

Neither surprise nor delight is required by those who have to do with Gorbachev and Gorbachevism. On the other hand, those emotions are the logical reactions of people who have become eyeless in the Gaza of Mikhail Gorbachev. And the danger is that once the passing delight and surprise are over, when cold reality sets in, the spiritual blindness and the chains of this moral prison holding down the human spirit will finally become too much. Men may well be tempted to shake and topple the very pillars of their material and earthly confinement and thus perish, unless a loving Father of all creatures still loves man so much that he will not abandon man in his self-made secularist prison and the darkness of his own unaided mind.

“All has been foreseen by God,” John Paul comments. “The Father of all of us has arranged human affairs so that they end with man being saved from himself.” For today men do need such a saving. “The growing secularism tends to obscure more and more and ultimately to negate man's natural creaturely values … which God's redemptive plan recognizes and empowers.” Without those values, human society would disintegrate.

In the shifting ground of human affairs today, the most surprising new contours are provided by two leaders, John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev appears as the active agent of changes to which the West is reacting, while John Paul II gives all the impression of one who,
not in mere reaction, is riding herd over these active and reactive participants. Why these two leaders should be able to exercise these key functions is a source of puzzlement to those who are not aware of the two men's importance; and to those who sometimes fail to appraise correctly and appreciate the reason for their prominence.

These two men are the only two among world leaders who not only head geopolitical institutions but have geopolitical aims. Geopolitics is their business. Now, the precise nature of the shift in world affairs is geopolitical. Alone among leaders, these two men have firsthand acquaintance with the geopolitical. But for the vast majority of onlookers and for many in government, geopolitics is merely a way of speaking about the mutual relationship of different systems of politics. Thus, the gargantuan change being effected in the shifting ground escapes them.

The term “geopolitics” is a relatively recent invention. It is composed of two Greek words, meaning “earth” and “political system,” which the ancient Greeks never combined.

Those Greeks were very aware of the relations between different states and nations, each with its own political system, each being what the Greeks called a
politeia
. They saw all of these as constituting a loosely connected arrangement of differing political entities. Whether the relationships between them were based on peaceful trading or on signed alliances and associations, or on subjugation and imperial domination, the Greeks' fundamental notion of internationalism was that it involved different politically structured systems. One state, one
politeia
, might dominate several others. Several states might group together in offensive and defensive alliances or in straight commercial and industrial partnership. But there never was a moment when the same political structure was accepted and established in what originally were politically different states. Nobody ever proposed that the same
politeia
be shared freely by the different states and nations.

This was the limited extent of their internationalism. Late in their history, some few individuals lauded and tried to practice the ideal of the
cosmopolitis
, the citizen of the world, the individual who felt “at home” in any and every one of the political systems of the day. But this was seen as an individual whimsy, a romantic and somewhat exotic experience, not as a desirable condition of mankind in general, and certainly not as embodying a political ideal to be striven for. They never even conceived of a
cosmopoliteia
. They never conjoined a word for “earth” or “world” with the word for “political system.”

Until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, this internationalism provided the only framework within which relationships between different nations and states were considered.

Sometime in the nineteenth century, the term “geopolitics” was coined by non-Greeks. By then, the constituent elements—states and nations—of internationalism had changed. For one thing, men could now speak of the whole of earth, the whole world, and all nations in it. Exploration had covered the face of the globe. For another, enormous commercial empires—British, French, Ottoman, Austrian, German, Dutch, Russian, Chinese—and some minor ones—Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese—dominated the world scene, cornering the raw power of earth's resources and the financial hegemony derived therefrom. The United States, neither a minor power nor a commercial empire in that society of nations, was still in the last stages of its own formation. Not until Woodrow Wilson boarded the
George Washington
for post-World War I Europe did the United States begin to flex genuinely internationalist muscles.

In this world situation, there had been born a certain homogeneity and overall standardization among nations and states. Internation relationships were more complex than ever before. Writers, thinkers and politicians, as well as bankers and economists, did think of that world as a loosely coagulated system of states regulated in their mutual relationships by some very generalized and generally observed rules of conduct. For a minute number of the very privileged classes, there was indeed a more developed form of the old Greek cosmopolitanism, but it remained an exoticism.

When the term “geopolitics” was used in reference to that world system, it implied the complex of relationships between all those world-spanning national interests and the “games” nations played,
Kriegspiel
and
Staatspiel
, the maintenance of peace and the conduct of statecraft in peacetime. Their peacetime was always defined in terms of an enemy. War was merely the conduct of statecraft and diplomacy in a more forthright way with that enemy. As the French cynically put it: Plus ça change,
plus c'est la même chose
.

Because the monopolies in trade and finance as well as military might rested in the hands of the Great Powers, “geopolitics” was also used to include the relationships between all minor and major powers. That network of relationships—reproducing the internationalism of the ancient Greeks in a more sophisticated and definitely worldwide ambit—was built and maintained with one end in view: the balance of power
between the Greats, and between their allies among the Minors. The clashes, economic, cultural, military, between the members of that international society concerned the pride of placement, and hegemony either in one part of the globe—Great Britain in Europe, Turkey in the Middle East—or internationally, say, in overall financial clout or naval supremacy on the seven seas.

Fundamentally, nothing had really changed since the Greeks. Internationalism had as its basic unit the individual
politeia
rooted in a particular state or nation, whether that was imperial Britain, republican France, democratic America or tiny protectorates like Sierra Leone or Sarawak. In a genuine, if limited, sense, the whole could be described as geopolitical; the word included all the political systems all over the earth.

Along that road of twenty-five centuries from the Greeks to modern times, there had been only two instances when the thought and concrete goals of some men went beyond this notion and practice of internationalism and approached the point where the reality of “earth” and “one political system” could be conjoined in one word.

The first in time was clearly enunciated and targeted as goal and ideal by a group of men and women who started off in the twilight of Greek civilization as the ragtag association of fishermen, servants, slaves, small merchants, dirt farmers, artisans and laborers—Jews and non-Jews—whom their enemies derisively called “Christians.” That name stuck. In the first days of their existence in and around Jerusalem, their self-description was of “one community with one heart and one soul, and holding all possessions in common.”

One of their earliest leaders in the first century of this first millennium, Paul of Tarsus, scrutinized the microcosm of nationalities and kingdoms, religions and cultures around him, and formulated the Christian refinement of the then regnant internationalism. He used his usual brilliant eloquence in doing this, but necessarily in terms of what he knew in his day as the society of nations. And, although the farthest west he personally ever reached was Spain, the farthest east and north was Greece and Turkey, the farthest south was Arabia, he spoke for all nations and peoples of the human race.

“You must now realize,” he wrote to the inhabitants of Colossae, a town located in what is now the Denizli province of western Turkey, “that you have become new men on account of the enlightenment you now have about your Creator and his preferred world, in which there is to be no distinction between Jew and non-Jew, Jewish Christian and
Gentile Christian, fellow citizen and foreigner, known and unknown people, slave and freeman. For, now, Christ is all of us, and Christ is in all of us.” Paul's inventory of differences and divisions that separated the people of his day into different and warring systems and groups finds exact parallels in our modern society of nations, states and peoples. According to Paul, all differences and divisions have been transcended by a new unity.

Nor was Paul speaking of a purely spiritual unity. He was laying down a blueprint for a new society of peoples and nations undivided by nationalism, racial origin, cultural diversity, wealth or poverty, political systems or religious hatred. Nor did he envisage the goal of that society of peoples to be a balance of power maintaining the equilibrium of greater and lesser. In his pregnant phrase, it is full-scale unity in Christ. A georeligion centered and dependent on Christ: This is what Paul presented as the underlying framework for the ideal internationalism. In his context, Paul could have justifiably used that hybrid word “geopolitics,” for he was speaking of a
geopoliteia
, one truly geopolitical structure for all mankind as one race.

Paul, as often happened, was the intelligent and perceptive formulator of a doctrine that would be taught and propagated to all peoples and nations by another man, Peter the Great Fisherman, and by his successors over in Rome. Despite his obscurity and cruel death, Peter had been given the Keys of authority to teach all men and women, and to establish thus the
geopoliteia
Paul had announced as God's plan for all men. That authority was guaranteed by the blood Christ shed. Within the span of some three hundred years and the pontificates of thirty-two successors to Peter as Bishop of Rome and official holder of the Keys of this blood, the initial obscurity of the Holder's office had been shed; Peter's papacy now assumed an increasingly dominant role in the development of nations. The Pauline goal, the Christian
geopoliteia
, was the goal of that papacy.