national security - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This open letter to President Trump presents a strategic assessment of current global trajectories through the lens of leverage, momentum, and irreversibility. It argues that several critical systems — energy, climate, ecosystems, global health, and international coordination — are approaching thresholds beyond which damage becomes structurally unavoidable, regardless of future intent or political will. Drawing on concepts familiar to negotiation and deal-making, the letter reframes planetary risk not as an ideological or moral concern, but as a matter of braking distance, option space, and long-term maneuverability. It warns that policies optimizing short-term strength, sovereignty, or throughput can unintentionally convert future strategic freedom into irreversible loss. The central claim is that durable power depends on preserving recoverability, buffers, and coordination capacity, and that leadership today is defined by the ability to slow dangerous momentum before critical boundaries are crossed. The letter concludes that maintaining future optionality is not weakness, but the highest form of dominance over time.

This paper presents a rigorous philosophical inquiry into the deep structure of war, challenging entrenched assumptions underpinning the dominant military paradigm. McMurtry demonstrates that prevailing concepts of “national security,” “self-defense,” and “just war” rest on unexamined metaphysical premises that normalize mass homicide as a rational necessity. By exposing the fallacies of equating national interest with militarized aggression and conflating security with destructive power, the paper argues for a fundamental reframing of war. McMurtry distinguishes between pathological wars — those that annihilate human life and capacities — and enabling wars, which target disabling patterns such as disease, corruption, and environmental degradation without destroying life. He contends that the primary enemy is not other nations or peoples but the institutionalized military system itself, which perpetuates cycles of violence, fear, and economic exploitation. The paper proposes a redirection of collective energies towards non-military modes of “war” that liberate human and ecological potential, challenging the conflation of survival with domination and opening a horizon of transformative alternatives for global peace.