SHAKESPEARE TO THE RESCUE?

The reader is by now well aware of my preoccupation with the Nietzschean concept of “the noble enemy,” translated by me into my “great boxers” metaphor, which I had once found ideally suited to elucidate the ideal state of American-Soviet superpower rivalry.

What kept me puzzled, though, was that so simple a concept as “the two champion boxers” (granted, the Nietzschean concept is somewhat more complicated!) was so hard to grasp for the American public, which used to uphold the unreasonable “either…or” position, that is, you are either a friend or a foe, and you just cannot be both. The hawks saw Russia as a total enemy, while the doves insisted on total  friendship. In this irreconcilable contradiction I somehow found myself caught in a domestic American crossfire, where both sides, the hawks and the doves, wanted me to join their side, mistakenly believing that I indeed belonged to their camp, and quickly frustrated by my refusal to join either.

This has actually been the biggest problem with the American political debate on virtually every issue, on my forty-year professional watch: In order to join the debate, you cannot appeal to an open mind of its participants. Unless you yourself become partisan, and thus easily identifiable with a pre-established political agenda, you will be treated as a foreign body, to be tossed out as one who does not belong.

I confess that I had realized that things were pretty much that way, yet I was still hoping to single-handedly change the parameters of the debate on the nature of the Soviet-American love-hate relationship. What was there so hard to understand, after all? The two boxers, why doesn’t either side see that? Why do the doves insist that the boxers quit the ring? Why do the hawks insist that there cannot be a life outside the ring?

Perhaps, there was a problem with the messenger? Nietzsche was too controversial; as for me, I couldn’t be more controversial myself. So, let us have a different messenger, who speaks English not just fluently and eloquently, but, even more importantly, natively, being one of the founding fathers of the Anglo-American Civilization. Here is Shakespeare for you, as quoted from his The Taming of the Shrew, and sending exactly the same message:

"Do as adversaries do in law,--

Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends."

Although my two boxers metaphor is still somewhat better suited for the America-Russia parallel, I do owe Shakespeare an ample measure of recognition for something that he was so keen to observe and formulate three hundred years before Nietzsche and four hundred years before me, and what so many people still fail to appreciate, that, among great powers, rivalry may be the sole condition of amity, and vice versa…

So, what is wrong with Shakespeare? Apparently, he is also a foreign body in the American public debate, to be ejected without mercy. Like Nietzsche and myself, he is talking about equals. But the American bipartisan foreign policy consensus does not suffer America’s equals gladly. America’s friendship today is not a friendship of equals, but one of submission to her hegemonic power, sweetened by a few dollars to further cement the relationship. And America’s enmity is not a glorious perennial combat of noble enemies. It is a hard ultimatum: you better be our friend, or else we shall obliterate you with all available means at our disposal.

The only problem with this attitude is that more and more nations of the world, Russia prominently among them, are by no means anxious to dance to Washington’s tune, and there may not be enough ammunition at Washington's disposal to bring them all to heel.