Unmappable threats

One thing you have to say for this fellow Kim Jong Un. He doesn’t pretend that he’s your friend only to double-cross you. He tells you right up front that you’re the enemy of North Korea, and that he wants nothing more than to destroy you.

Sort of like Iran and its stance toward Israel. “We will annihilate you,” Iran’s leaders have threatened repeatedly through the years. And then just six weeks ago, Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei went out of his way to offer a very specific nine-point outline of reasons why Iran will wipe out Israel. No need to read between the lines or to guess about intentions.

But dangerous as they are, Kim Jong Un and Khamenei are perhaps no longer the forces in the world most to be feared. More typically these days, our enemies in a terribly complex setting are far more ambiguous, far more confusing, far more subtle, and far more obscure. And because of all that, they also tend to be far more dangerous.

The playing field itself is today so very different—so terrifyingly multidimensional. A key component of my earliest geopolitical education was the detailed daily map in The Des Moines Register highlighting the battle for the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s. The day-to-day changes in the jagged battle lines offered a regular summary of the advances and retreats of American forces—a graphic charting, as it were, of our national well-being. I was about 10, and I learned to interpret those maps about the same time I learned to read the major league baseball standings. It all seemed such a simple and helpful graphic display of everything that was important in life. It was good to know, in such simple terms, who was winning and who was losing.

How could I know then—indeed, how could a nation know—that America’s next war would defy the daily newspaper’s mapmakers? In Vietnam, the enemy wasn’t simply “over there,” behind those lines that used to be so easy to chart. Instead, the enemy was more and more perceived to be within, around, above, beneath, and everywhere. At home, the nation itself seemed just as subdivided.

A society that doesn’t know itself and its own character can’t possibly know who its enemies are.

So while we cowered in our fortresses worrying about some physical attack by Kim or Khamenei, the society we thought we were defending was quietly disintegrating from within. I suggest three examples worth our serious concern.

The concept of traditional marriage comes first—if only because it was the first of all relationships ordered by God following His creational acts. And if we suppose that gay marriage is the most withering challenge to God’s plan, we demonstrate how very quiet the real attack has been. Probably no assault on real marriage has been more destructive than the wave of no-fault divorce that swept our society just a generation ago, and has splintered us ever since.

Closely related to the marriage issue is the concept of family. When more than half the children of any subgroup of a society are missing a traditional relationship with a father or mother figure, it’s appropriate to question whether that society has any right to expect future solidarity—behaviorally, economically, or on any other front.

A third example of internal destruction is our grand societal commitment to various doctrines of pluralism—by which we keep affirming to each other that all ultimate values in life are of equal worth and consideration. It’s one thing to defend each other’s rights to express all kinds of opinions. It’s quite something else to pretend that all such expressions are equally true.

My main point here is that none of these destructive forces came as though imposed on us by some outside marauder. Neither Kim nor Khamenei has yet threatened us, holding the trigger of a nuclear weapon, either to adopt such ultimately radical changes or to find our cities and countryside being powderized. All this malarkey is something we taught to ourselves.

A society that doesn’t know itself and its own character can’t possibly know who its enemies are. They slip regularly and easily in and out of the places we live in not because we’re badly guarded at the border—but because definable borders simply no longer exist.

How do you put all that on a map?

Email jbelz@wng.org