Global Issues
Lost Opportunities to Halt Rising Military Spending
NEW YORK, January 6 (IPS) - The United Nations issued a year end Fact Sheet: Rising global military expenditures, starkly illuminating that last year’s record high of $2.7 trillion in military expenditures, caused a cascade of devastating consequences to human well-being, the environment, possibilities for avoiding climate collapse, as well as blows to employment, ending hunger and poverty, providing health care, education, and other ills, due to a lack of adequate funding support.
The Fact Sheet does an admirable job of illustrating the shocking maldistribution of States massive military expenditures and what that money could buy in many instances, such as to end hunger and malnutrition, provide clean water and sanitation, education, environmental remediation, and so much more.
But isn’t it time for the UN to issue a Fact Sheet: Lost Opportunities to Halt Rising Military Expenditures and Heal the Earth? After all, just this summer on the 80th Anniversary of WWII, Russia and China issued a Joint Statement by the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on Global Strategic Security in which they urged that in acknowledging that anniversary and the founding of the United Nations, States and their associations “should not seek to ensure their own security at the expense and to the detriment of the security of other States.” adding that “the destinies of the peoples of all countries are interrelated.”
Even a cursory examination of the sorry history of the United States and its nuclear alliance, in seeking to secure military domination at the expense of Russia and China, shows a sad list of missed opportunities to accept Russia and China’s offers to negotiate for peace and disarmament, which would have freed up trillions of dollars over the years to address the crisis we now face for preserving all life on earth.
The most recent opportunity that should be on the list, (met with deafening silence by the corrupt western media, laboring under the heavy thumb of their corporate military sponsors, who delight in the billions lining their pockets to produce the burgeoning war machine) was China and Russia’s Joint Statement criticizing the US misbegotten Golden Dome space project and opposing any countries use of outer space for armed confrontation.”
They urged negotiations based on the Russian-Chinese draft treaty to prevent weapons and use of force in outer space, proposed at the UN Committee on Disarmament in 2008 and 2014, where consensus is required to negotiate a treaty and the United States vetoed it each time, preventing any discussion. Amazingly, they further pledged that to prevent an arms race in outer space and promote peace in space, they would “agree to promote on a global scale the international initiative/political commitment not to be the first to deploy weapons in outer space.” In other words, No First Use.
While peace in space is the most recent Lost Opportunity, the first Lost Opportunity happened in 1946 when President Truman rejected Stalin’s proposal that the US turn the bomb over to international supervision at the newly formed UN, so Russia got the bomb.
President Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s plea to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down and Gorbachev released all of Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation, thus losing the opportunity to abolish our nuclear arsenals.
More Lost Opportunities: the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) up to Russia’s border despite promises made when the wall came down that NATO would not expand east of a reunified Germany:
President Clinton’s refusal of Putin’s offer to go down to 1000 bombs each, and then call all nuclear states to negotiate for their elimination, provided the US stopped developing missile sites in Romania.
President Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put the new base in Romania; President Trump put one in Poland.
President Obama rejected Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war! [i]
Had the US been more open over the years to cooperation, instead of losing so many opportunities to make peace, we would be so much more able to deal with the urgency of preserving a livable planet for all and avoiding the dire consequences enumerated in the new UN Fact Sheet on global military expenditures. It’s still not too late to take up the Russian-Chinese proposal for peace in space. May wiser heads prevail.
Alice Slater serves on the Boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and is a UN NGO Representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
IPS UN Bureau
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