Murtaza Hussain looks for a moral baseline in a world riven by power and conflict

Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy (https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/). He has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other news outlets. We had a sobering conversation about the political structure of the globalized world. One of the many frank projections that Murtaza shares in this conversation is his sense that it’s fairly likely that the United States and China will be engaged in some form of military conflict within the next twenty years. And this is just one of the striking observations that he makes. There’s a deep analysis here that centres around a serious gap between the world that he wants and the world that he sees, and much of our conversation actually comes back to that gap between the moral aspirations that we might have as empathetic citizens of the world, the rights-based order we wish existed, and the “inherently conflictual” character of the world as it is. He actually expands on the ways that a tradition of political philosophy engages with the extent to which nations and polities are locked into efforts to constrain each other through force and dominance, and suggests that refusing to grasp that means that “we miss a lot” about the structure of societies. Again, he makes it clear that the world he reports on and tries to understand is not the one that he wants to exist, but I think it’s for that reason that he reports on global affairs in the honest, shrewd way that he does. I mean, in this conversation he is talking in no uncertain terms about how Ukraine’s decision to denuclearize, to not retain their nuclear weapons, meant that they had to abandon “the ultimate guarantor” of national sovereignty. Given up under global pressure and incentives—assurances that were not met—the loss of a nuclear arsenal, he feels, in part led to the situation it is currently in, where the international community has determined that the cost of deterring Russia is too high and the country cannot fully defend itself against Russian aggression. What does it mean that this terrifying power is an “insurance policy” in the contemporary world? Ignoring the reality doesn’t change it. And yet, as he points out, there are realities that can be ignored. While there’s little evidence that sanctions, for example, succeed in changing the behaviour of governments, sanctions are still imposed without any real consideration for the social impact or political effectiveness they will have. As Hussain says, they are “done without even thinking” because “no one is holding you to account” and the deaths that they produced are “indirect.” So, in terms of the United States positing itself as a “benevolent actor” by imposing sanctions or even arming Ukraine, it’s unclear whether anyone in the global community actually feels that it wipes the imperialist record of the US clean just because it currently seems to be on the right side of a military conflict. What I found so profound, too, in what Murtaza was talking about here is that he, over and over, comes back to this question of establishing a “moral baseline” in a world torn apart. He says that there is clearly a “grievous disparity between what lives are considered grievable or not,” and that what this means is that, outside of the political and epistemological boundaries of the nation-state, we need to really think seriously about what our principles are, beyond the vast imperialist power blocs. The alternative is a world where there is, to again quote him here, there is a “collective conspiracy of silence about human rights abuses… because we’re all doing it.”