DEFCON, Neocon, Katechon

The 1983 movie WarGames introduced many Americans to the concept of MAD, or “mutual assured destruction.” A young Matthew Broderick plays a teenage hacker who accidentally discovers a U.S. government supercomputer simulating exchanges of nuclear warheads in preparation for a real war with the Soviet Union. By the end of the film, Broderick and another noble techie teach the supercomputer that, in any nuclear conflict, the destruction of all players is guaranteed. Mutually assured, you might say. The computer learns the lesson, and war, cinematically at least, is averted.

I saw the movie as a boy and was frightened. Other movies at the time — Red Dawn (1984), about teenagers using guerrilla warfare against Soviet invaders in Colorado, and Rocky IV (1985), in which the all-American boxer fights the almost robotically evil Russian Ivan Drago — left little room for doubt. The Soviets were not to be trusted. They were plotting something, somewhere, and had to be restrained.

Restraint was the motif of WarGames. Restraint of the Russians, yes, but that was only a subplot. The Americans were restraining the Soviet communists, but the system the Americans had set up to do so also needed restraining. Alas, that system had a mind of its own, as evidenced by another U.S. government neologism WarGames taught us: DEFCON. It stands for “defense readiness condition” and, like MAD, is a byproduct of looming nuclear Armageddon. Beginning in the late 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military brass and civilian overseers developed DEFCON as a way to ratchet up or down the readiness of American armed forces. DEFCON 1, the highest rung on the readiness ladder, indicates that nuclear war is imminent.

This was hardly bluff or posture. Beginning in the summer of 1946, not even one year after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government detonated atomic, then thermonuclear, weapons of increasing megaton yields. Film of mushroom clouds rising over the Bikini Atoll following the 1954 Castle Bravo tests is famous. But there were many others. By 1992, the year the tests ostensibly ended, Washington had conducted over a thousand. Though the tests are gone, the threat remains. Today, the U.S. government deploys some 1,770 nuclear warheads and has a stockpile of more than 5,100, though this is but a sixth or so of the maximum of more than 31,000 the government had in 1967. Washington was not just playing around with acronyms and numbers when it set up the DEFCON parameter. It was serious — and so were the Russians — about unleashing the Apocalypse to keep a geopolitical adversary at bay. The calculus of MAD may have been just that — madness — but it was cold, hard logic, too. The whole world will be blown to smithereens, the thinking went, before we see it fall into the hands of the enemy.

I always believed the contours of this multigenerational showdown were socioeconomic, that it was due to disagreement about how buying and selling ought to go. The Cold War, I had been taught, was when capitalists and communists held the planet hostage to thermonuclear obliteration just to prove a point about which system of organizing a government and an economy was better. There was more to it than that, of course. There was colonialism, anti-colonialism, and post-colonialism, for example, with “Third World” countries fighting for self-determination. There was Soviet and American imperialism on that score. There was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Vietnam War, the Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge, the Russians in Afghanistan, the Prague Spring, and the Polish Solidarity Movement. However events and ideas played out in the news cycle, the fact remained that there were two massive arsenals, one with weapons stenciled in Cyrillic lettering and the other in the Roman alphabet, pointed all over the world, waiting to end it all at the push of a button.

Then the whole thing was called off. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, setting in motion the end of the crazed era. When the Soviet Union went the way of Berlin’s hunk of graffitied masonry in 1991, I thought, “Thank God, we’re saved!” Now we could relax a little. Sing a little “Kumbaya,” even. Have a Coke and a smile.

Well, that didn’t last. Before long, Washington refocused on the Balkans, bombing cities for reasons that didn’t make much sense. Washington bombed Iraq, too, and then conducted “operations” in Somalia. There was some unpleasantness in Haiti. Kosovo had its turn in the Western crosshairs. And then airplanes hit the World Trade Center, and all hell broke loose. There was more war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and a global War on Terror. The neocons, a group of geopolitical zealots plotting all this mayhem in order to remake the world in Washington’s image, were the last thing I saw coming. The neocons argued that, even though the Soviet Union was in the dustbin of history, America had an obligation to keep going until history itself ended and every last square inch of the earth was a modern liberal democracy. The Cold War, in other words, was just prelude to the Forever War the neocons ginned up once America had become the world’s sole superpower.

The neocons, who have decidedly fallen out of favor due to Americans’ having tired of dying for them, have been cast as Jewish interlopers, Yankee Puritans (I’m guilty of this one), and tools of Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. But the neocons, and the arc of Western history more broadly, came into focus after I reread the works of German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Like their DEFCON-obsessed forebears, neocons are not just madmen who see war as a means to self-enrichment or the aggrandizement of a certain political idea. They are working from a much older script. They are deeply Christian — not confessionally, perhaps, but in their outlook, their Weltanschauung.

One of Schmitt’s core concepts is the katechon, the restrainer. As the Bible teaches, evil is a mystery, one deeply intertwined with the affairs of this world and the prerogatives of eternity working in and against it. Calvin Dieter Ullrich wrote an excellent summary of the Schmittian katechon for the online journal Critical Legal Thinking in 2018:

The concept of the katechon first appears in biblical literature…in the second deutero-Pauline epistle to the Thessalonians (2:6-7): “And now you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed.”

In the context of apocalyptic literature, the function of the katechon is to constrain the eschatological enthusiasm of the Christian Thessalonian church who are eagerly awaiting the return of Christ. The restraint that the katechon enforces is directly related to the forces of evil — the evil one — who brings about disorder and lawlessness. God’s historical agent, the katechon, not only tempers the eschatological enthusiasm for the parousia of Christ, but also by doing so, attempts to restore order in the midst of crisis and chaos. The image of the katechon is clearly situated within the context of the metaphysical conflict between the forces of good and evil. The period of the eschaton, wherein we wait for the heavenly kingdom to be instituted in our temporal reality, is marked by evil forces. God, however, appoints the katechon to bring about the necessary stability in these last days. The deeply ambiguous figure of the katechon can thus be viewed both positively and negatively: restraining the forces of evil, but also holding back the return of Christ.

The political powers that be, though far from good in their own right, do the inscrutable work of keeping the monstrous enemy of God from both wreaking havoc in our world and setting into motion the events that will culminate in evil’s final defeat. The “nomos of the earth,” as Schmitt taught, is the system of laws and norms that chains the evil beast below the level of the state, allowing the state to remain in power. It also became the foundation of the world system of sovereign states the Europeans spread as they took possession of lands far beyond the Continent beginning in the 15th century. Schmitt sees this European-style, nomos-of-the-earth state as secular, but when considered in light of his theory of the katechon, it becomes clear that the world system the Europeans created, which the Americans inherited and amplified, is eschatological. Why must there be a world system? Why must there be empires that brook no challengers, empires that use genocide to clear land as a matter of course? Because evil must be checked. Because the horrors of the world hold back the horrors of the world-ender.

This explains why tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been talking a lot about the Antichrist recently. Thiel is the founder of, among other things, Palantir Technologies, a software company that is heavily involved in the military-industrial complex. In a series of addresses before a select, secretive audience in San Francisco, Thiel (per recordings summarized by the Washington Post) argues that those who seek government restraints on technological innovation are playing into the Antichrist’s hands. As the Post puts it, Thiel believes such restraints will only “threaten to usher in the destruction of the United States and an era of global totalitarian rule.” Thiel criticizes thinkers like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who take skeptical views of artificial intelligence (AI). But these people are not Thiel’s Antichrist. Thiel uses the Antichrist trope to provide enough religious heft to his arguments to make them frightening — so frightening that average people will take him seriously, and government regulations of AI will be averted. Thiel thinks American-made AI (the kind, incidentally, he sells to the Pentagon) is the katechon (though he doesn’t use the term), keeping shadowy, unpredictable, up-to-no-good adversaries from doing their worst — which is worse than anyone could possibly imagine.

Thiel claims to be a Christian and was introduced as such during his private addresses in San Francisco. There is some irony, then, in Thiel’s disavowing the substance of his Antichrist talk, while admitting he wants to use it as a catalyst for the hoi polloi’s fears. But there is much more irony in both Thiel’s and Schmitt’s thinking that unholy, primordial chaos can be restrained by a nomos of the earth — in the form of the secular nation-state, with or without AI enhancement — that is rooted in a principle as non-secular as they come. The Catholic Schmitt was a member of the National Socialist Party — yes, those National Socialists — and thought the Nazis kept real mayhem from rising up out of German blood and soil. Thiel, a homosexual, is no Nazi, but he thinks Washington, which has killed many more people than the Nazis could ever have hoped to, is the enforcer that will keep serious baddies from emerging and going berserk.

When Washington and Silicon Valley types talk about adversaries in the new game of global dominance, it’s not difficult to identify whom they mean. Washington’s rival in the AI race, and much else, is the People’s Republic of China. This October officials from Japan and the United States signed a memorandum of cooperation on “AI, quantum technology, biotechnology,” and other “cutting-edge science and technology.” The memorandum recognizes “the importance of deepening ties in science and technology with strategic partners across the Indo-Pacific as a means to strengthen stability in the region.” Stability in the region is not-too-subtle code for “restraining China.” What gets left out of agreements like these, however, as well as from the panoply of statements, interviews, books, articles, speeches, and general hysteria about the rise of China, is that Washington, which now frets about containing the Beijing behemoth, nurtured it, growing it into the beast it has become. The globalism China retooled to its own advantage, the nomos of the earth that half a millennium of Euro-American empires laid crisscross through the institutions, policies, and minds of the planet, and the free-trade doctrine into which Beijing was initiated at the behest of Washington and the World Trade Organization — all that, all the keys to the kingdom, were turned by the West and given by the West to China.

Why would a king raise up his own assassin? Why would a sovereign give succor and care to the child he knows will grow into the man who will dethrone him? The answer is the same as to the question why two Enlightenment capitals, Washington and Moscow, both claiming to be successors to the Roman Empire, would risk utter annihilation to prove a point (what was the point again?) about politics. To recap á la Schmitt: After Columbus, Europeans strode forth and conquered all. We can supply more details. England rose up and restrained Spain and then France, and then Europe banded together and restrained itself with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, only to round out the century mass-murdering and dispossessing Africans and Asians. Then Europe tore itself to pieces restraining Germany, with the United States helping out while also restraining Japan. Then the United States replaced the British Empire and restrained the Soviet Union, and then the Russians blinked and only America remained, a colossus with no katechon, a nomos unto itself with no Antichrist to keep at bay. And so America had to invent one, lest the world truly fall into chaos. There must be endless foreign wars, because otherwise there shall be murder in the streets. Nothing has changed since Christians took over the Roman Empire and learned the complexity of politics in the double key of City of Man and City of God.

So, here we are today, in a faltering empire that, in clamoring about Vladimir Putin’s being the Devil incarnate and insisting that the mullahs in Iran must be wiped off the face of the earth, still repeats the oldest plotline in Western political history. We need enemies more than anything else. Our enemies let us keep the relative peace. Without enemies, we are doomed. American conservatives are fond of rehearsing John Quincy Adams’s 1821 speech to the House of Representatives that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” They invoke George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, in which he warned his countrymen not to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice,” not to form permanent alliances. But there is one permanent alliance he overlooked, and that is the alliance between the katechon of government and the “forces of evil,” the mysterious entanglement of the nomos of the earth and the chaos of “lawlessness,” the two locked in battle until the Son of Man comes again in glory. That is the alliance that DEFCON scramblers, neocon warhawks, billionaire “prophets” of Armageddon, and Christians who call for a “new American century” can’t seem to relinquish.

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