By Winslow Myers
Our global security system, based in who has the most and the most modern weapons to enforce deterrence, is gradually becoming irrelevant, undermined by the ever-intensifying climate emergency. If any given nation is experiencing droughts, floods, and unbearable, even life-threatening heat, what difference does it make if its government possesses more nuclear weapons than its adversaries?
This immense paradigm shift, though it is taking place right before our eyes, is hard to see and harder to keep in mind. Headlines about war eclipse complex stories of semi-visible change. Especially if we are climate skeptics or have a financial interest in not changing the way we operate, it’s hard to admit that the fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes raising our insurance premiums are tied directly to the climate crisis. Unbearable heat is coming first for the equatorial countries, though unless we change it will come for the temperate ones, too.
The shift includes the realization that everyone on Earth makes their contribution to the potentiality of nuclear war and various climate disasters according to individual and collective decisions. This is a form of conscious interdependence that we have never experienced before, even if variations of the Golden Rule, too often ignored, permeate the world’s religions.
Meanwhile we are caught up in the middle of the shift, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the fecklessness and brutality of the presidents of Russia and the United States, as they seem to be negotiating a disgraceful deal to end the war in Ukraine with the insufficient involvement of Europe or Ukraine itself.
All the limitations in the global security system are revealed by Putin’s aggression and America’s flailing response—the reality that he can threaten to use nuclear weapons but that he can’t win anything with nuclear weapons, the reality that international institutions including the United Nations have insufficient power to bring Putin to his senses.
At the same time this war which has indiscriminately killed children and pregnant women in hospitals and grandmothers in their apartments is taking place in the larger context of the deep shift outlined above. If the thawing and melting of Russia’s vast frozen tundra accelerates and spews methane, a potent warming agent, into the Earth’s atmosphere, Putin’s dream of recovered Russian greatness will dissolve, as the Earth regresses into forms of chaos that will be far beyond the control of the most wily and paranoid autocrat, be they Russian, American, Hungarian, North Korean, take your pick.
Can we hold in our hearts and minds two opposing conceptions of security? On the one hand, we experience indignation that the people of Ukraine must suffer such monumental injustice, and on the other we also know that aggressive wars led by autocrats lead nowhere and will become more and more a distraction from the immense challenge of climate. Resources we allow to flow into the deterrence system by the trillions will be unavailable for building more solar panels. The environmental impacts of war and war preparation are a massive contribution to climate chaos.
Our wars are a monumental failure of our capacity to see ourselves in the other, revealing our shared interest in working together not just to resolve our differences peacefully but to plan for climate effects that are coming for everyone, rich and poor.
Putin and Trump are representatives of this tragic shortfall of ethical imagination. Ukraine is paying the price. The pundits are already handicapping the next possible test of obsolete paradigms of power: China and Taiwan. Both of those great nations manufacture software that can help the world make the transition to regenerative technologies more successfully and rapidly. What would a war between them prove, besides providing another occasion for nuclear brinksmanship or far worse?
Beyond the shift lies the possibility of a world where the trillions spent on war and weapons are redirected toward meeting human needs directly, creating a virtuous circle that spirals up into prevention rather than down into violence. Far from being utopian, the shift will be necessary for our survival. Positing the most optimistic scenarios, the damage we have already done to ourselves is going to require an immense educational, economic, military and political reorientation—as one example, think of what it will take in time and resources just to rebuild Gaza.
When it comes to both nukes and climate, my survival depends upon how those on the other side of the planet think and act, and their survival depends upon what initiatives I take. This commonality of self-interest can even be seen as an opportunity, at least in the immediate future. But to the extent we continue to drift (for example, no mention was made at the latest climate gathering final agreement in Brazil of the need to move beyond fossil fuels) the window of relative order that allows for proactive initiative will begin to close.
Choosing life over death, cooperation over competition, poses a direct threat to the arms business, the nearest thing on Earth to a perpetual motion machine. But where there is deep awareness and agreement that all of us share the human adventure together and each is responsible for all, the required shift will gather momentum. It will release our creative energies toward the real challenge of making our peace with the Earth. Only then can the biosphere continue to sustain us into the next phase of the human story. Fortunately, the Earth itself has immense self-healing capabilities if we work with it.
Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the co-author with Libby Traubman of One: One Humanity, One Earth, One Future, and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative.
