By Russell Vandenbroucke
Amid Russian attacks on Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and civil wars in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, violence persists in corners of our world unfamiliar to most Americans.
At home, on the other hand, the Trump administration liquidated the voting board of the United States Institute of Peace last month, a prelude to destroying its operation in a subsequent invasion by DOGE crusaders who were accompanied by armed police to protect Musk’s minions from unarmed fellow citizens at work. With USIP’s board eradicated and its staff terminated, the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State signed papers commandeering USIP’s assets, then ordering that its home—across Constitution Avenue from the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall—be reassigned to the General Service Administrative for unspecified alternative purposes.
My summary sounds like a joke concocted to confirm the notion that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. If only. USIP has been erased like a village that a hurricane swept away or an earthquake devoured. Web searches now end with, “Sorry, you have been blocked. You are unable to access usip.org”.
Peace, like justice, have become suspect. Neither remains a treasured value or American ideal.
Who knew that Ronald Reagan was a closeted radical, in 1984, when he signed legislation funding a nonpartisan, independent think tank to “promote international peace and the resolution of conflicts among the nations and peoples of the world without recourse to violence.” He and Congress recognized that averting violent conflicts is preferable to intervening once they begin, a war-and-peace variation on a familiar healthcare objective: prevention.
Preventing cancer is preferable to radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery; avoiding diabetes is preferable to managing potential consequence like heart and kidney disease, stroke, or blindness. Violence always leads to more violence, and preventing its most deadly form, war, is patently preferable to the death and destruction that inevitably follow.
A decade ago, Marine Corps General Zinni wrote that USIP’s “entire budget would not pay for the Afghan war for three hours, is less than the cost of a fighter plane, and wouldn’t sustain even 40 American troops in Afghanistan for a year.” Today, the Pentagon’s budget of more than $800 billion is nearly 1,500 times USIP’s $56 million, and the Department of Defense’s workforce of military and civilian personnel, three million combined, is 6,000 times larger than USIP’s (former) roster of fewer than 500.
John Lennon’s “give peace a chance” is suddenly passé.
USIP’s motto, “Making Peace Possible,” is tacit in a 2020 press release, “Over its 35 years, the Institute has trained tens of thousands of peacebuilders from 198 countries and territories in the skills needed to prevent or reduce violence.” A common USIP tool to do so is conflict transformation. Its specific efforts to analyze and prevent conflict, now shuttered, include:
- more than 300 programs in 16 countries with priority in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tunisia;
- four priority areas: strategic rivalry; violence and extremism in fragile states; global shocks; and American peacebuilding, which includes fostering reconciliation and building institutions that manage conflict without resorting to violence;
- mitigating the risk of conflict where “China and Russia are attempting to expand their cultural, economic, military, and political influence;”
- stabilizing distressed communities in Central America’s Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) through dialogue between police services and civil society and facilitating consultation between governments and citizens in high-migration districts.
If President Trump’s disdain for peacebuilding were not disorienting enough, consider the qualifications of USIP’s new acting president: Nate Cavanaugh, now 28, the founder of Brainbase, an intellectual property and trademark licensing management tool that he created in his dorm room as a freshman, his only year of college.
Russell Vandenbroucke, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of theatre at the University of Louisville, where he was Founding Director of its Peace, Justice & Conflict Transformation Program.
