The alternative is a maternal thinking that situates the rational strategist as its object of critique. We embrace vulnerability and recognize the impossibility of perfecting control for protection.

Vulnerability: Contrasting conceptions Ruddick’s work on maternal thinking offers us more than a prompt to focus on the question of “whose vulnerability?” is acknowledged in a security discourse and whose is denied, displaced, and effaced. Attention to the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities and habits, and identification of virtues that are part of maternal thinking about vulnerability, when contrasted with those that are part of security thinking, help to make the strangeness and dysfunction of security thinking more evident and to make alternatives to its logic more imaginable. In other words, even putting aside the question of whose vulnerability is acknowledged in a security discourse, I would argue that in, for example, the most state-centric conception of national security, the conventional assumptions about and logics of how to best respond to the demand for preservation of the state can be thrown into relief, and rethought, by attending to the ways of thinking that Ruddick described as arising out of maternal practice. So in this section, I will consider some of the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities/habits, and identification of virtues that Ruddick wrote about as characterizing preservative love, and have a look at what they make especially strange about national security thinking. “To give birth is to create a life that cannot be kept safe, whose unfolding cannot be controlled and whose eventual death is certain” (Ruddick, 1989: 72). Clearly, Ruddick is talking about a human life here, which, as we have already established, is not the principal referent of either nuclear or national security discourse. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to use this sentence as a heuristic for thinking about the state, and the moment that we do, the contrast with US national security thinking could not be more apparent. In maternal thinking, we find the acknowledgement of the impossibility of creating perfect safety or invulnerability, the impossibility of control, and the inevitability of decline. US national security policy, in contrast, seems to be based in denial of each of these, as vast human, financial, and natural resources are spent in the effort to make the US militarily invulnerable, to control the United States’ own fate via controlling the actions and regimes of other states, and to maintain the belief that “We’re Number One” and that we can and must continue to be so far into the future. In a sense, US national security policy might best be metaphorized by President Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI), also popularly known as “Star Wars”—the vision of erecting an impermeable shield around the United States to protect it from a possible attack by strategic nuclear missiles; that is, to try make the United States invulnerable at all costs, even though most scientists agreed it was technologically impossible, and the financial cost would have been extraordinary (Cohn, 1989). But while SDI may work as a metaphor of the quest for invulnerability and the denial of its impossibility, there is at least one way in which the metaphor falls short. Reagan’s protective dome was to cover only the territory within US borders; in contrast, US national security policy has characteristically sought invulnerability, control, and supremacy by taking military action far outside its own borders. In the so-called GWOT, for example, the United States uses drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen to kill individuals whose actions are seen to make the United States vulnerable. What maternal thinking can open to us, then, is the question: what kind of national security policy would be recognized as rational if we acknowledged that vulnerability is inevitable, that control has limits, and that ultimately decline is unavoidable? What alternative policies would be crafted? How would we think about security, and about preservation of the state, as well as of human beings and the planet? What kinds of military, foreign, and economic policies might appear most rational, if we acknowledged those realities? Exploration of these questions has typically been foreclosed in security policy circles by the symbolic association of vulnerability with the “feminine”; that which is associated with the feminine, or inadequate masculinity, is not only devalued in national security discourse, it is also excluded from deliberation as inherently inadequate (Cohn, 1993). However, admitting irreducible vulnerability does not, despite policymakers’ apparent fears, equate with giving up, passivity, or powerlessness. Ruddick describes one response to vulnerability as the development of a “mental habit or cognitive style” that she calls “scrutinizing”: “mothers are on the lookout for dangers before they appear” (Ruddick, 1989: 71–72). At first, this cognitive habit might sound just like US security thinking, but in maternal thinking, this habit is tempered in several ways. First, in Ruddick’s account, both scrutinizing and protective love involve a kind of double focus—furtive glances at potential dangers even while one goes about normal events, and simultaneous awareness of the near and the eternal (Ruddick, 1989: 78). In contrast, the capacity for a split focus, for a complex rather than singular attention that can take in both short- and long-term dangers and values sounds like something that is too often missing in US security practice. “Furtive glances at potential dangers even while one goes about normal events” describes a state of being aware of potential dangers, but not letting them dominate your decision making, not letting fear of them reorient your priorities, not giving up or diverting resources from the sustaining activities and projects of daily life, all of which is arguably not a description of the balance between US attention to and investments in countering potential military threats, and its attention to and investments in the projects and practices that sustain daily life and long-term societal growth, from health care and education to public utilities and transportation infrastructure. Similarly, a split focus that attends to both short- and long-term dangers at times seems notably absent from US security policy; an example can be seen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the United States decided to encourage Islamic groups from around the world to come to Afghanistan and to provide billions in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding for building those groups up, despite warnings from Afghan experts that this would have disastrous longer term consequences (Hartman, 2002). Ruddick also warns that scrutinizing is a watchful gaze that can become “obsessive or intrusive”; however, at its best, it is tempered by a kind of metaphysical humility about what one can actually control (Ruddick, 1989: 72). Writing just a few weeks after the leaked revelations about the US National Security Agency’s “PRISM” program of covert electronic surveillance and mass data collection, focusing on the danger of “scrutinizing” within national security practice becoming “obsessive or intrusive” would seem gratuitous. And, in fact, I think it is the “metaphysical humility” that is of deeper interest here. Ruddick does not see this metaphysical humility as either automatic or unique to mothers or mothering practices; instead, it is an attitude that the drive toward preservation will have to cultivate if it is done with some reflective awareness. “Thus this wise attitude about the limits of control is not innate to the practice, but emerging from a thoughtful engagement in the practice” (Ruddick, 1989). Untempered scrutinizing, being on the lookout for dangers before they appear without the benefit of metaphysical humility, is many ways a perfect description of a cornerstone of US national security practices of assessment and planning, known as “worst-case thinking.” A prominent part of Cold War thinking, and still exemplified today in new doctrines such as AirSea Battle, the strategist imagines the very worst thing that could possibly happen and then plans backward from there, assuming that the only way to prevent it is the development and deployment of weapons (Wass de Czege, 2012); through worst-case planning, gargantuan investments of energy, research capacity, and money in weapons technologies come to appear rational or justifiable, even though they most likely will never be needed or used. Critically, in worst-case thinking, the question of how likely it is that a particular hypothetical threat will materialize is ruled out of bounds; if in a strategist’s wildest imagination a threat can be conjured as possible, how probable it is is considered irrelevant. Similarly, although there might be means other than military ones to forestall the hypothetical threat, such as diplomacy, alliance building, or disarmament (and these could affect probability), worst-case thinking abjures these considerations. For all that worst-case thinking is justified in the name of “realism,” when viewed through the lens of maternal thinking, the scrutinizing of worst-case thinking can be seen to be obsessive, as well as lacking a realistic metaphysical humility about the limits of control—and the moderation which would follow from that humility. In Ruddick’s account, “although protecting work is never finished, there are no perfectly protected children and … the best control provides for the limits of that control” (Ruddick, 1989: 73). According to Ruddick, maternal thinking develops distinctive ways of thinking about control; the task of preserving a growing, changing, and self-directing being within a tumultuous, complex, and dangerous environment engenders distinctive attitudes about the recalcitrance of the given, and the “recalcitrant givens” include both complex human beings and complex and dangerous environments. In other words, although a mother recognizes the dangers that threaten her or his5 child, and might wish to perfectly protect the child from hunger, disease, accident, failure, self-harm, violence or heartbreak, she or he knows that this perfect protection is not possible. Instead, a reflective maternal practice will include acts of preservative love, nurturance, and training designed to equip the child with resources for avoiding dangers when possible and for otherwise dealing with the consequences of dangers that neither mother nor child will be able to perfectly control. Metaphysical humility about the limits of control and the recalcitrance of the given, then, can lead to more rational thinking about responses to threats. The mother in the United States who recognizes her or his daughter’s vulnerability to sexual violence might decide to send her daughter to self-defense classes but will recognize that attempting to identify all the men who might ever assault her and to target them with drones would not only be illegal and immoral, but also not the use of resources most conducive to family health and happiness. Taking maternal thinking as heuristic, we would need to ask whether worst-case thinking, untempered by metaphysical humility, is any better for the state than it is for the family. And if unbridled worst-case thinking were renounced as a basis for national security strategy, how might policymakers within the state (including but not restricted to the military branch) think in new ways about both avoiding dangers and dealing with their consequences?