Plato’s Cave and its “Shadows”
Though the subject of world politics is always important, it deserves absolute primacy in 2026. Most worrisome is the steadily growing risk of nuclear war. In essence, national leaders seem less and less able to understand the difference between true causes and mere “shadows.” To help clarify and correct this disjunction, scholars should examine the insights of an ancient Greek philosopher and his metaphorical “cave.”

In The Republic, Plato explains that all decipherable political activity is ultimately “shadow.”¹  Taken seriously, this explanation is significant not only for national decision-makers, political philosophers, and military thinkers, but also for anyone trying to make coherent analytic sense of terrorism, war, and peace².  Prima facie, it is significant for anyone who simply wishes to survive on planet earth.

But how shall we proceed with necessary conceptual understandings? First, thinking persons will need to acknowledge that individual needs and values are never discoverable at conspicuous surfaces of intellectual understanding. What will matter most in pertinent political assessment are outcomes they might never have been expected. Though many could understand why they value personal religious attachments, few would be able to connect these preferences to promises of “power over death.” Individuum est ineffable, reminds nineteenth-century poet-philosopher Goethe, author of Faust: “The individual cannot be grasped.”

Many particulars lie beyond Platonic “shadow.” As these originating elements are vague or “opaque,” they represent variously complex investigations. For the United States, a society unaccustomed to bothering with history, law, or challenging ideas (Donald Trump assures his followers that “attitude is more important than preparation”)³, there is little cause to expect knowledge-based inquiries. Still, whatever the anti-intellectual orientation of American “mass”⁴  - an amalgam that displays intentional disrespect for considerations of “mind” - meaningful explanations of American foreign policies will require concept-based investigations. 

Even more than fully-fashioned theories, concepts are fundamental. More specific to ascertaining threats in matters of war and peace, three basic concepts deserve pride of place. Intersecting and subtle, these core notions are shadow, time and truth. But the discovery of relevant meanings will represent a daunting intellectual task, one of the highest possible order.

A “next question” dawns: How shall Americans and others proceed if their own national governance is to be improved, especially in a corrosive world system shaped by wars of aggression and nuclear weapons?⁵  What can shadow, time and truth teach America’s leaders about the global present and future?⁶  How shall the United States advance beyond the persistently gratuitous rancor of current policy-making?

To answer thoughtfully, all must begin with the individual human microcosm. In this connection, though generally disregarded and de facto invisible, “power over death” represents the ultimate reward for dutiful political compliance. On its face, there can never be any greater power to confer than a promise of immortality. This is the case whether the promise is open and unhidden or expressed only in whispers, sotto voce.

Personal Faith and the “Hunger of Immortality ⁷
“I believe,” says Oswald Spengler in his 20th century classic, The Decline of the West (1918-1923), “is the one great word against metaphysical fear.” In this bewilderingly abstract connection, we may still learn from Emmanuel Levinas something of head spinning import: "It is through death," says the twentieth-century philosopher,  "that there is time...."⁸  This means, among other things, that a nation that can seemingly enhance the incomparable promise of personal immortality can also heighten certain “force-multiplying” promises of time.⁹  

But what can such dense abstraction have to do with explaining war and peace? To be sure, these are not easy concepts to understand, especially in the context of Donald Trump’s defiling preoccupation with “shadows.” Nonetheless, no nation so incessantly willing to subordinate truth to “anti-reason”¹⁰  can reasonably expect to improve its survival prospects.

These are not easy ideas for scholars or political leaders to unravel. Still, these ideas are more clearly explanatory of America’s existential challenges than political personalities. If temporality is contingent on death - because human mortality puts a "stop" to each individual’s time¹¹  - an antecedent question will need to be posed: “How does one gain power over death¹²,  and what does any such gain have to do with the fate of a particular state or nation?”     

What next? Before venturing a proper answer, scholars and leaders should first distinguish between actual or tangible power and the power that lies latent in purported ties to God.  From the start, incontestably, humans have sought variously reassuring ties to the sacred.  

In world politics, truth often emerges through paradox. Presently, several core truths are being revealed in the US-Israel war against Iran. Here, especially, any cumulative hopes that individual human beings (the “microcosm”) can rise "above mortality" could have critical consequences for the “macrocosm.” ¹³ 

At his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observes: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opines in Philosophy of Right (1820) that states represent "the march of God in the world."  In the current war against Iran, belligerents on all sides are anxious to “team up” with God.

So, certain widely-cited philosophic views tie loyalty to the state (usually, an unquestioned loyalty) with a promise of “power over death.” By definition, of course, this is a monumental promise, one generally recognized only in the vague “shadows” of military activity. Whenever the capable historian looks beyond such deflecting shadows, he or she discovers no plausible evidence of such a promise being kept. But how could it be otherwise?

Immortality represents an extraordinary and unfulfillable promise, but one that still remains alluringly special.¹⁴  During this continuously dissembling “Trump Era,” an American president’s personal “brand” of belligerent nationalism¹⁵  ("America First"¹⁶) offers deserving "patriots” this preposterous promise. In the end, because it is founded on doctrinal anti-reason, "America First" embraces a vision of time that hastens death at intersecting microcosmic and macrocosmic levels.  

Additional nuances warrant competent examination. In all relevant matters, faith and science overlap further with variously coinciding considerations of law. The fearful "deification" of Realpolitik, a transformation of ideology from abstract principle of action to sacred end in itself, drew germinal strength from the doctrine of “sovereignty.”¹⁷ 

First conceived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a juridical principle of internal order, this doctrine subsequently underwent far-reaching metamorphoses. Incrementally, it became the justifying legal rationale for corrosive “self-help” remedies amid uncontrollable international anarchy. To wit, this is precisely US President Donald Trump’s justification for America’s ongoing war against Iran. Significantly, Trump has extended this implicit justification from issues of jus ad bellum (“justice of war”) to ones of jus in bello (“justice in war”). A clear result of this law-violating extension has been open indifference to humanitarian international law or the law of war.¹⁸

Sovereignty and “Power Over Death”
To understand complex policy intersections, we must better understand "sovereignty." Established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty quickly came to be regarded as the supreme power, absolute and above all other forms of law¹⁹.  In the oft-recited and oft-studied words of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan: "Where there is no common Power, there is no law."

As to correspondences with time, Hobbes explains why this lawless condition should be called "war” even when there is no “actual fighting.” Because  "war consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of Time....,²⁰"  scholars and policy-makers will need to broaden their most fundamental ideas of “war.” Though this would first appear an arcane or esoteric requirement, one without links to “real world” policy-making, the opposite is true. 

There is more. When it is understood in terms of modern world politics, the doctrine of sovereignty encourages the refractory notion that states  (1) lie above and beyond any legal regulation in their interactions with each other, and (2) act rationally whenever they seek tangible benefits at the expense of other states or the global system as a whole²¹.  Still, amid increasing bitter Trump derangements²²,  this doctrine now threatens a wholesale collapse of world legal order. Credo quia absurdum, opine Roman philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”

Time and the Hobbesian “State of War”
Without suitable changes in the Hobbesian "tract of time," the global State of War nurtured by manipulated ideas about sovereignty²³  points not only to an immutable human mortality, but also toward death on unprecedented levels. One theme other than war and peace is climate change denial, a witting posture of doctrinal anti-reason. Left unaffected by proper considerations of scientific analysis and refined intellect, such denial could eventually produce another mass extinction event on planet earth²⁴.  At that point, by definition, time will have lost all its potentially remediating meanings and death will “inherit” all that still is. 

The Barbarism of Specialization
In the end, world politics should be understood as much more than a second-order activity, i.e., as a simple reflection of what is truly important. For now, a constituent American politics continues to draw its own “life” from a vast common emptiness, a collective infirmity that represents the defiling reciprocal of personal fulfillment. 

Even in a true American democracy, only “The Few” could ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider world. Inter alia, these self-effacing “souls” would almost certainly remain hidden and silent. Plausibly, in a democracy where education has been increasingly oriented toward narrowly-vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward Ortega y’ Gassett’s "barbarous specialization," these residual Few should expect “suffocation by the Mass.” 

America’s Trump-accelerated detachment from intellectual life did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing. Rather, it was the inevitable result of a society that had abandoned most forms of serious thought. When such a society no longer asked the "big philosophical questions" - for example, "What is the "good" in government and politics"? or "How do I lead a good life as person and citizen"? or "How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings"? – the deleterious outcome for both national and world politics became almost unstoppable.²⁵  

To survive in world politics, all states must finally acknowledge the interrelatedness of all peoples and the universality of authoritative international law²⁶.  In part, more Americans will need to become seriously educated, not as well-trained cogs in a reconfiguring industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens of the world. "Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself," cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932),²⁷  but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. It is in this overarching failure of empathic "operationalization" that human civilization has most plainly inscribed its collective fate.

How shall we change all this? Recalling Plato's wisdom in The Republic, how shall we "learn to make the souls of the citizens better?" This is not a question that anyone can answer with catch phrases or empty witticisms. But it is a question that ought still to be put before the American polity.²⁸ 

Americans in particular will need to get beyond the demeaning banalities of partisan politics, beyond the distracting and murderous “shadows” of what is most genuinely important. Immutably, but often invisibly, most residents of planet earth regard “power over death” as the highest conceivable form of power. Still, it remains unclear just how such ultimate power (a power based on what Freud calls “wish fulfillment”) could be linked purposefully to any nation’s politics and foreign policies. 

It’s time for a summation. To best ensure that world politics are dignified, decent and (above all) survivable, constituent states must first learn to distinguish authentic human feelings and behaviors from “shadows.” Once we can begin to understand world politics at their irreducible points of origin, we could finally act to free an imperiled global system of states from the relentlessly lethal grip of belligerent nationalism. In fulfilling this fundamental obligation, informed recollections of Plato’s cave could offer scholars and policy-makers a simple yet indispensable vision of truth.