Highway to the Coolest Zone

War's back? I'm back!

In Internet argot, “The Cool Zone” is a period that’s fun to read about and crap to live through. For many leftists, for instance, there’s the French Revolution—bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, pants-wetting was it in that afternoon to approach the guillotine. I’m not sure what the paradigmatic rightist Cool Zone would be (the Crusades?) but you can fill in the blanks. For Americans, the classic U.S. Cool Zone is, almost certainly, the Second World War, a conflict whose death grip on our cultural imagination continues even as the ranks of those who remember it firsthand dwindle. The war, based as it seems if you only watch the winners’ highlight reel, was awful to live through, even for Americans, whether they fought or not.

To live through, rather than to read about, a moment that’s apt to become fodder for future historians—those deified future entities to whom intellectuals pray for eternal, if textual, salvation—is to realize how hard it is to capture in words the feeling of being there, not least because so often one is being there in the same way that one has been in every other moment of one’s life. We are all on the train of mortality, catching glimpses of history as we hurtle down the tracks, glimpsing the passing world with the detachment passengers have for the scenery outside. We segment our personal histories neatly from the future textbook images, which arrive on screens: a fifth birthday party, a glimpse of the Wall coming down on the television, a T-ball game, hours of the Persian Gulf War on television, moving into college, seeing the World Trade Center collapse on television, a flight to a new country,—and then suddenly history sounds its arrival with a thud as an Iranian missile is knocked out overhead.

Every happy moment is boring in the same way, but every disaster unfolds in particulars. Yet living through, even peripherally, such a moment offers what I imagine is a proper degree of empathy for those who have lived through other moments: you do not know the rupture is coming until it comes, and then it comes and you are conscious of it, but unless you are truly unfortunate it will come and yet you will still have to make dinner and shave and use the bathroom. Historical transformations offer no respite from chores.

I am not sure that what has happened to me here recently is a Cool Zone but it’s certainly been chillier than my life to date. It is, to be sure, something of stolen valor to compare what I’ve been experiencing the past few months to a war war. The delta between what people texting me in the early days thought we were going through and the banality of what it actually entailed—running out to the mall for an enormous platter of grocery-store sushi on the second day, for instance—makes me question whether I really experienced anything to write home about, even though the folks back home have not had their houses shook by intercepts. I have too many Lebanese colleagues and acquaintances to compare what I went through with a hot war—but even there, I know, people pay rent and go shopping and mark time in ways that resemble what they were doing before. And there’s further stations to encounter past that on the path to real war, the kind they sanitize in Hollywood. Yet this is my war, so far, and what a strange time it has been.

Our experiences of any calamity are shaped by what we bring to the moment, just as what the moment brings to us will shape us henceforward. Paul Fussell, an infantryman in the Second World War and thus someone whose war-experiencing credentials are beyond doubt, was an aspiring aesthete and critic, and his recollections of his war show that cast plainly:

The scene was less apocalyptic than shabbily ironic: it sorted so ill with modern popular assumptions about the idea of progress and attendant improvements in public health, social welfare, and social justice. To transform guiltless boys into cold marble after passing them through unbearable fear and humiliation and pain and contempt seemed to do them an interesting injustice. I decided to ponder these things.

Fussell was talking about waking up from a night-time bivouac to a morning sun revealing he had slept next to the corpses of German boy-soldiers. My experience to date is less gruesome and much less smelly—but there is certainly something to be said for the fact that in early February I was giving an impromptu lecture on missile defense systems to students in a course on nuclear diplomacy and weeks later I was watching those same systems in action as part of a war mostly about nuclear weapons. Good-bye to world orders, rules-based or even just velvety-imperialized; khalas to a notion of a U.S.-led progressive international system. Abstractions like “alliances” and “hegemony” and “regional security architectures” make for ethereal corpses, yet there I was, waking up to see them dissolve. I decided to ponder these things.

Fussell struggled after the war to convince others that his unit really had seen action in the last few weeks of the European war, that the fighting hadn’t dissolved into a pleasant mist but had continued to splatter guts all the way to the surrender. He grew annoyed at innocent interlocutors’ ignorance of his experience. So, too, I grow annoyed with authorities assuring me that, as they did in the early days, the State Department stood ready to assist or, more recently, that the United States won the conflict on points. Simply eyewitnessing events doesn’t make your analysis more credible—but when cheerleaders in the country waging the war seem to lack any comprehension of how the war is actually unfolding, one does begin to understand why the boys at the front hurl invectives not at the enemy but at their comrades back in the comforts of headquarters.

Theory can be, and has been, a comfort. Watching and hearing and feeling the missiles has provided me with ample grist for teaching Schelling (as readers of this newsletter will recall). Theories of bargaining and signaling have helped me parse what each side might be trying to say to one another—and to think about how those theories might suggest ways that negotiations might even work, in some narrow sense. Certainly, teaching these concepts has also been far more rewarding—my contribution to a better world even as the current one falls apart—because it turns out you really need to pack your brain now with the tools you’ll need in a crisis. A crisis is no time to read a textbook—but it’s probably a good idea to have read one before the crisis hits. ¹

But it has also bred a certain ironic detachment. What in the hell was Schelling, who never saw combat even to my limited extent, talking about when he assumed that combatants could simply understand the message that targeting choices were sending? “Say it with flowers,” say the ads, but if one is saying it with missiles the message is apt to be lost. Faced with a concrete application of his beautiful theory in the early days of the U.S. war in Vietnam even Schelling couldn’t figure out how to negotiate kinetically. (Well, at least I’ll make sure to add some Jervis to the syllabus next time.)

There has also been the dread served up by theory, of course, like how nuclear programs and control of maritime chokepoints are exactly the sort of hard-to-divide issues that make peaceful resolution of conflicts difficult. As a social scientist rather than a historian, I appear to be fated to experience my Cool Zone as a theoretical construct of the present rather than the past. Living at once in both the normal world of emails and Temu deliveries and the hyperworld of theory makes for double vision. The hyperworld shows me that my online shopping is delivered in the midst of a strategic situation in which we are just stuck with pain that forces neither combatant to real negotiations; another surface of the theory-world shows me scenarios in which the relevant leader is so flighty that we will be suddenly unstuck in the worst way.

To be in a cool zone, or a space adjacent to one, teaches lessons I receive while I grind through routines during the exception. Being a scholar of the topics I am living through creates a superposition of the mundane and the dreadful. It is intellectually stimulating—clarifying, even. It is nurturing my empathy for those in situations that, however dissimilar in the particulars, are identical in the dullness of the anxieties. Fussell observes that after his war he joined “thousands of veterans [who] swarmed to graduate schools to study literature, persuaded that poetry and prose could save the world, or at least help wash away some of the intellectual shame of the years we’d been through.” After this is all over, maybe I too will grasp for meaning.

1. This is true even in a very specific sense: you never know when you’ll be live on Al Jazeera talking about the limits of coercion through airpower on a panel with Bob Pape. Comps are useful!