March 2003                                                                  THE 21^st CENTURY POPULIST

 “The Great Equalizer” 
by Don Schellhardt

        Early in the movie Grand Canyon, an auto mechanic played by Danny Glover confronts an armed ghetto teenager on the streets of South Central L.A.   At one point, the teenager asks whether Glover’s character respects him.

        “Truth is,” Glover’s character replies, “you ain’t carryin’ that gun, we ain’t havin’ this conversation.”

        “I know,” the teenager responds.   “That’s why I carry the gun.”

        The point is:   The context in which modern international relations occur is not that different from South Central L.A.   --    or, if you prefer, the Wild Wild West.     

        In practice, international law is heeded only in cases where not that much is at stake.   As in the modern ghetto or the Old American West, a centralized, impartial law enforcement authority is either functionally non-existent or only intermittently present, at best.    Not surprisingly, disputes are often settled by force or (somewhat more frequently) by threat of force:   that is, by muscle or the perception of muscle.    

        On America’s Western frontier, firearms helped to prevent the total domination of the culture and the economy by those with the most muscle and the fewest moral restraints.    The six-gun was commonly called “The Great Equalizer” because it equalized differences in physical strength (and shifted the basis for balances of power to differences in intelligence and skill).     With a pistol, a 5-foot, 100-pound woman could defeat a 6-foot, 200-pound man, if she were the better shot.

         If you will “Fast Forward” to the international conflicts of the present, you can see how countries such as Iraq or North Korea could view nuclear weapons as today’s “Great Equalizer”.     While there is little doubt who would suffer more in a nuclear war between Iraq and/or North Korea and the United States,  the presence of a single deliverable nuclear weapon is probably enough to deter the U.S. from using (or credibly threatening to use) its nuclear firepower.     Like the six-gun, the presence of deliverable nuclear weapons On The Other Side effectively forces the U.S. to wage war with conventional weapons only   --    moving any military conflicts onto a “playing field” where the odds are somewhat more even.   The U.S. might even be forced to forego externally imposed “regime changes” completely, lest a regime on the verge of military defeat decide to go down with all of its guns blazing.

         I will not argue that nuclear weapons in the hands of Iraq or North Korea are a good thing.    I will argue only that the desire for such nuclear weapons is a natural thing, for a small power that wants to become a larger power.     A nation may well seek nuclear weapons as tools for intimidation and aggression, but it may also seek them   --   instead, or in addition   --  as tools for self-preservation.

         Thus, the looming war with Iraq may be an exercise in futility.    All nations in “The Axis of Evil” are pursuing nuclear weapons, and still more small powers have a natural incentive to follow.    Unless the U.S. is ready to fight a dozen wars, it must find ways to deter small nuclear powers, instead of trying to disarm them by force.

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