By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 26, 2026

Peering out from the United States, it’s hard to see much of China. One learns general facts and gathers views from a small number of people. But I can’t make a lot of sense out of this 4% of humanity over here (or myself for that matter), and don’t have much hope at all for deeply understanding that 17% of humanity over there. It seems worth some effort, however, to build better relationships and understanding, since the U.S. government is overwhelmingly obsessed with competing with China, and there seems to be no serious line in the minds of U.S. officials between peaceful and bellicose competition.

By the very limited calculation generally used (omitting significant secret spending), the U.S. government spends 38% of the world’s military spending and China 12%. (In third place, if it were a military, would be a paramilitary force the United States uses internally against its own people called ICE or “Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”) In actual third place is Russia at 6% of global military spending. The next 25 nations combined — all U.S. weapons customers, allies, or partners of one sort or another — spend a combined 36% of global military spending, leaving the nearly 200 remaining nations (including every other nation threatened by or viewed as an enemy by the U.S. government) to make up the remaining 8% of military spending. (I don’t know any data for North Korea, but knowing it wouldn’t change the basic outline of this picture.)

Increases in U.S. military spending have, for generations, been justified by the military spending (or false exaggerations thereof) of China and Russia. And not just spending, but also U.S. base building, alliance forming, weapons testing, and wars. For example, President Donald Trump has recently claimed without evidence that if he (functioning effectively as the entire U.S. government) doesn’t take over Greenland or Venezuela, then China or Russia will do so. Following the dismantling of the Soviet Union, there was about a decade in which it became a little harder to promote military spending increases in the United States (and we heard a little more than usual about China). That has been followed by a quarter century of the U.S. government making everything that it could out of demonizing Muslims in Western Asia. But, in the end, only the massive spending of China convinces those in the United States who are paying enough attention to see the basic state of the world and yet not enough attention to grasp where the arms race inevitably leads us.

In the United States, pretty much everyone, regardless of political perspective, calls the United States the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. It’s an idiotic thing to say, because it’s meaningless to compare wealth over radically different societies, but also because such a measure only makes any sense — at least in the way millions of people use it — if it’s measured per capita, and several other countries are wealthier than the United States per capita. In the sadistic game of global domination and empire, perhaps the per capita measure can be set aside, and the fact that the United States and China have similar overall amounts of money can become a cause of great concern. But most of us in the United States who do not work for the government (or for the people the government works for) couldn’t care less which nation has the most money. Some of us even stop to wonder why a nation with over four times as many people shouldn’t have over four times as much money, especially if it can share some of it around internally at least slightly better than the U.S. nation does. And, for some of us, the pressing concern is the parts of the world that have dramatically too little wealth and need some basic human generosity, not a contest of nationalisms among the biggest nations’ governments — much of whose wealth, after all, is in a small number of hands of people whose business ventures are more global than is the peace movement.

When it comes to military spending, the per capita measure may also be of little interest to those selling the weapons. They don’t even like the overall sum anymore. They want military spending measured as a portion of a nation’s economy. Only by this means can they disguise how far above the rest of the world the U.S. government is in overall military spending, and also in per capita military spending (in the latter it is outdone only by Israel, which is heavily subsidized by the U.S. government). And only by viewing military spending as a percentage of an economy can they make it sound small and demand ever more of it, free from all the historical and cross-border comparisons that leave it looking unprecedented and insane. And yet, if you are going to treat military spending as a philanthropic enterprise, a duty to the world to be maximized quite regardless of any claims about threats and dangers, then it’s hard to completely exclude the per capita question. Who is the alleged benefit of war preparations for if not people? So, how is China doing by its people or the world’s people in this regard? There are 56 countries spending more on militarism per capita than China does.

As an overall number, China has spent far more on militarism in recent years than any nation other than the United States. But it has done so with very, very different results. When U.S. military spending goes up, one can confidently predict more wars. For generations now, polling in the United States has found that most people have no idea how much U.S. military spending is, but when told how it compares to U.S. government spending on other things most people then want it reduced. They’d prefer more spending on education or on the environment. Yet no massive movement emerges to reduce the military spending, or even to reduce particular parts of it — such as nuclear weapons. Instead, we get the most public outrage over particular wars. So, some of us point to the wars as a symptom and the money as the disease. But China is a problem for that position of ours, because by spending a third as much on war preparations, China doesn’t get a third as many wars; instead it gets no major wars at all — yet.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 2019 told President Trump that if he was so worried about “China getting ahead of us,” he should consider that the United States was constantly at war, to the tune of trillions of dollars, while China had not gone to war since 1979 and instead spent its money on things like infrastructure. To the extent that this is true, it begs the question of how China has avoided major wars over a period of time for which virtually no one in the United States can even name all the wars the U.S. military has been in. Of course, each war has been chosen by human beings who have consciously worked to avoid any outcome other than war. Of course, the U.S. government has been gradually, over the centuries, reduced more and more to a single individual whose whims send tens of thousands of troops rolling into operation. But the opportunities for more wars may also arise more frequently because of how exactly the United States spends its military spending.

One notable difference in how the U.S. war machine is shaped is in foreign military bases. As far as we can tell (nobody willingly informs us) the U.S. military has almost 900 bases in about 95 countries outside the United States. The U.S. military collaborates closely with, if not completely dictates to, the military of the United Kingdom, which has 117 bases in 13 countries outside the UK. In contrast, China — as far as we can tell — has a total of six foreign bases in six countries. (Please help us update this information.) As the six are all fairly new, one hopes they are not a sign of things to come, because the U.S. bases seem to have a lot to do with getting the United States into wars. In Djibouti, which seems to be trying to fill its small country with a base from every other country, people at the U.S. base have already made accusations against the people at the Chinese base. Closing those two bases (simultaneously for the sake of the egos of the individuals involved and the shortcomings of our educational systems and our systems for choosing leaders) would seem an intelligent step. Doing almost anything jointly would open up great possibilities for addressing jointly the crises of climate, nuclear weapons, disease, technology, etc.

The global array of bases is part of a global empire of commands: Southern Command, Central Command, etc., through which the U.S. military claims to oversee the entire planet. When its forces do something in Venezuela, it’s not called Venezuela but rather the territory of the Southern Command. China is not on the U.S. military’s map either. Instead, what some people call China is just part of the territory overseen by the U.S. Pacific Command. In this way, the U.S. foreign bases are thought of as not even foreign, and U.S. wars are understood as defensive no matter how many thousands of miles away from the actual United States. The same idea is strengthened by alliances, such as NATO and AUKUS. These alliances are both dictated to by the U.S. military and imagined as not just international but as quasi-global establishers of law. They include in them Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. U.S. military bases can be found — as may be better known in China than in the United States — in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Guam, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and islands across the Pacific.

In 2013, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech to a room full of U.S. bankers in which she claimed that she had told Chinese diplomats that China had no right to call the South China Sea the South China Sea, that the United States could in fact claim to own the entire Pacific Ocean by virtue of having “liberated” it in World War II, and having “discovered” Japan, and having “bought” Hawaii. Clinton was using three common U.S. euphemisms for “conquering.”

Recently, the Prime Minister of Canada gave a speech to a gathering of oligarchs at Davos, Switzerland, in which he proposed that U.S. allies stand up to U.S. bullying. It’s unlikely he meant what he said, as he continues to buy U.S. weapons, sell the U.S. weapons, support NATO, join in the missile project Trump calls the Golden Dome, etc. And he didn’t even say that the world should institute the equal rule of law for all, only that it has not done so. He’s now assigned the Canadian military to prepare for a possible war with the United States, but has not provided any support to the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice. In fact, he tried to join Trump’s committee for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (the “Board of Peace”) until Trump rejected him.

The government of China has many reasons to suspect international structures of unfairly favoring the United States, but there is nothing the U.S. government fears more than the equal rule of law for all. I’d love to hear a Chinese explanation for not joining the International Criminal Court. That biased investigations might follow seems mild compared to what might follow from relying on a “balance” of killing machines, alliances, and nuclear weapons to keep the peace. Why should China not join the Convention on Cluster Munitions? Why should China not lead the way on international justice? China abuses the United Nations Security Council veto far less than does either the United States or Russia. Why not work with the International Court of Justice and the General Assembly to undo lawless vetoes, democratize the UN, and take international law out from under the thumb of Washington? No, the Chinese government has no reason at all to listen to me. No, I do not blame China for U.S. crimes. Yes, I focus my energies on trying to reverse everything the U.S. government does. I’m merely asking wise individuals in China to explain their views to me, because all I can gather from U.S. media outlets is that China hopes to enslave me, and I’m pretty sure that’s made up.

Europe is seeking to follow U.S. instructions to undo its social progress and shift its resources very heavily to war, even if sometimes it calls this “standing up to the United States.” It would be a shame for China to do the same. At the same time, these countries make profits selling weapons to the rest of the world, including numerous potential future enemies. While the United States is responsible for 47% of weapons exports, France is at 8%, Germany 7%, Italy 5%, Russia 5%, and China 4%. Somebody needs to put a stop to this, not reproduce it on a smaller scale.

China has shown some signs of leadership — more than the United States or Russia. Of all the nations with nuclear weapons, only China has sworn off first-use and kept its weapons off its missiles. In 2025, China and Russia jointly made a statement in support of the rule of law to some extent. The statement proposed a treaty on keeping weapons out of space, objected to foreign bases (which, however, China and Russia have), objected to deploying nuclear weapons to foreign bases (which, however, Russia was in the process of doing in Belarus), and expressed support for the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (without proposing disarmament of either nuclear or non-nuclear weapons — both of which the treaty requires). Were the U.S. government to join Russia and China on those points, the world would be a safer place. But Russia and China were mostly asking the United States to do better, not proposing to subject their own behavior to international accountability. Since at least the Nuremberg trials, this has been exactly the U.S. position: others need to shape up but the U.S. government is itself above the rule of law.

In the same statement, Russia and China expressed support for the Biological Weapons Convention and accused the United States of having biological weapons. It has not been definitively proven or disproven that the COVID pandemic originated in a U.S.-funded bio-weapons lab in China, or that other pandemics originated in a similar way elsewhere in the world, but the possibility exists because of the existence of such labs; and the risk will continue because the sensible step of ridding the world of such labs has been set outside polite discourse in the United States as the enactment of a crazed “conspiracy theory.” The Biological Weapons Convention bans all development, production, and stockpiling of biological weapons, but lacks the kind of infrastructure and enforcement mechanism that the Chemical Weapons Convention, for instance, has. Why not close the labs and strengthen the treaty? What a supreme irony if Washington and Beijing focus on their rivalry while quietly jointly risking massive pandemics through the secrecy and arrogance of those islands of cooperation: scientific laboratories!

I sympathize with China. In fact, I ought to apologize to China for the actions of the government whose abuses I live under. Not only is China confronted with a great arc of U.S. military bases near its border, but every two years the United States and its allies and weapons customers hold a massive maritime war rehearsal called RIMPAC or Rim of the Pacific, explicitly practicing for war against China, which until 2016 had been invited to participate in RIMPAC. Beyond major multinational war “games,” the U.S. military holds frequent bilateral war practices with numerous other nations, despite the objections of protesters in those nations and of the governments of the nations being targeted. When the United States and South Korea rehearse nuclear attacks on North Korea, the North Korean government objects in the strongest terms, and engages in its own war rehearsals. The anti-China war “exercises” held by the U.S. and Australia in 2025 were the largest ever for Australia and brought in militaries from 19 nations. We know from the late great U.S. whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg that the U.S. government’s plan in the event of any nuclear war with Russia or China was at one time — and perhaps still is — to let loose its nuclear weapons targeting all of both Russia and China.

The U.S. government clings to some pretenses that it has almost lost the ability to convince anyone of. One is that its hostility toward China is driven by some sort of ideological principle. Another is that its hostility toward China is driven by its anger at Chinese human rights abuses. Sure, the Chinese government is different from the U.S. government, but not dramatically so, not standing at the end of some spectrum of worldviews. Sure, the Chinese government does horrible things — show me one that doesn’t — but nobody being killed by the U.S. government in U.S. streets wants to be bombed by Venezuela or Iran or China, and it’s becoming very hard to convince U.S. residents that Venezuelan or Iranian or Chinese people want to be bombed because of something their government does to them — no matter what it is. Instead, the motivations for U.S. wars of competition and greed are increasingly recognized, and openly professed. While this helps the work of those of us seeking to end all wars and militarism, it does not by any means guarantee our success.

In fact, we’ve been racking up the failures: war after war after war. And President Carter’s concern about the financial cost is not the only sort of cost that’s been suffered. Huge numbers of people have been killed, injured, traumatized, and made homeless in the locations of U.S. wars, and smaller numbers among members of the U.S. military. Our nation’s culture has been brutalized, and heavily armed. Mass shootings are often by war veterans. Weapons development has poisoned our air and water. War madness has stripped away our civil liberties. War propaganda has boosted our bigotry. Our borders and airports and local police have been turned into militarized war camps. Our wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a few — many of them merchants of death. But the decent and peaceful among us are not completely out of the game. We’ve prevented wars as well. Each war has been chosen, but many potential wars have not been.

The risk of war should worry decision makers in China. China has — like most countries — an imperial and divisive past that has left tensions in place. China has avoided wars with India, the Philippines, Taiwan, etc., but might not avoid them forever. Even “defensive” militarism relies on risking war, and luck eventually runs out. If the U.S. government could get China into a war with Japan or the Philippines or India, and itself stay out of it, the war might cause immense suffering even without going nuclear. But any such war risks going nuclear. And then whose fault it was will matter little to the smoking rocks left behind. My fervent hope is that Taiwan is not Ukraine.

What I mean by that is that the United States and Russia antagonized each other over Ukraine. The United States backed Russia into a corner, until its officials understood their self-respect — viewed through filters of militarism — to require a military invasion. This was announced in the name of standing up to NATO, even though we all knew that a Russian invasion would do more than anything else had in decades to strengthen NATO, to revive NATO, to restore NATO’s raison d’etre, to bring more governments and more weapons deals into NATO. That, in turn, has done wonders for Russian militarism. The weapons dealers are winning big. But the rest of us are, according to numerous observers, at greater risk than ever before of nuclear apocalypse. Being from the United States, I hear the voice of Bob Dylan scratching through the decades:

But when the shadowy sun sets on the oneThat fired the gunHe’ll see by his graveOn the stone that remainsCarved next to his nameHis epitaph plainOnly a pawn in their game

Aren’t we all? Are we anything other than pawns in the games of the masters of war, until we disarm them and direct them toward peace? We can be. We can be if we build a global movement for the abolition of war and the establishment of a just and sustainable peace. People in the United States and China, for example, need to become aware that there are those in the other place who care deeply. I thought about titling this article “To China With Love.” But we need more than just nationalistic peace movements that are friendly with each other. We need a global peace movement opposed to all militarism, great and small, here and there, without fear or favor or apology or glorification of any militarism anywhere. Not because all offenses are equal, but because it’s the weapons or us; this planet cannot hold both.

I think that people in China could help the rest of us develop a global culture that rejects war, that celebrates the advantages of foregoing war, that repositions excitement and adventure and purpose in non-military fields, such as infrastructure development and environmental protection. I think that the rest of us could help warn people in China of the danger of supposing that you can prepare for war on a massive scale and expect eternal peace, any more than you can build millions of hammers and never expect a nail to be struck.

But, one might ask, aren’t the choices between (1) reckless militarism run by madmen or (2) more restrained militarism as a wise deterrent? No, those are not the only choices. In fact, both of those choices lead us to apocalypse. The maintenance of nuclear weapons requires great luck, which does not last forever. The near accidents of catastrophic proportions have been many in the United States, and we even know of many in the Soviet Union / Russia. Have there not been any close calls in China, even with the wise policy of keeping the weapons off the missiles? Someone knows. The years in which China has avoided war are a blip in time, as a culture as long-lasting as China’s knows better than I. If war is planned for, even as a supposed defense, war is eventually very likely to arrive.

So, what then?

The best defense is not a good offense. The best defense is preventing the creation of the other side’s offense. (I suspect you could even run that through robot translators several times and discover that Sun Tzu said it.) In other words, we all need to be working actively to establish global structures of law, of cooperation, and of resolution of conflicts without war. One part of that can be the employment of unarmed civilian defense as a national strategy.

Studies find nonviolence more likely than violence to succeed in achieving just goals, and those successes to be longer lasting. Yet we’re told over and over again that violence (and the threat of violence) is the only option. Had violence been the only tool ever used, we could obviously try something new. But no such imagination or innovation is required. We have now, from recent decades, a rapidly growing list of successful nonviolent campaigns already used in situations in which we’re often told war is needed: invasions, occupations, coups, and dictatorships — I mean campaigns of direct popular action, unarmed civilian defense used successfully in place of violent conflict.

In October 2025 in Peru, protests forced out a brutal and illegitimate president. In December 2024 in Korea, in six hours people nonviolently undid martial law. In Bangladesh in 2024, a student-led movement replaced an oppressive government without “resorting to war.” In Bolivia in 2024, people thwarted a coup attempt. An so on. Of course nonviolent action can be used for all variety of causes ranging from very good to deeply evil, but when it is used with good intentions, it is more likely to achieve that good than violence would be.

It’s quite a high hurdle to appeal to a country that’s been militarily invaded –after decades of military defense (and offense) preparations and the accompanying cultural indoctrination in the supposed necessity of military defense — to appeal to said country to construct on-the-fly an unarmed civilian defense plan and act on it despite near-universal lack of training or even comprehension. But a more reasonable proposal is for national governments that are not at war to learn about and establish departments of unarmed civilian defense. A properly prepared unarmed defense department (something that might require a major investment of 2 or 3 percent of a military budget) could make a nation ungovernable if attacked by another country or a coup d’état, and therefore immune from conquest.

Nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp combed history to find and record hundreds of methods that have been used successfully to thwart oppression. His search led him to a vision of unarmed civilian defense (which he called civilian-based defense), an alternative system that could serve the “security” functions supposedly provided by what much of the world unthinkingly accepts as an inevitable War System. Sharp, whose sometimes questionable career produced very useful research, wrote about “defense by civilians (as distinct from military personnel) using civilian means of struggle (as distinct from military and paramilitary means). This is a policy intended to deter and defeat foreign military invasions, occupations, and internal usurpations.” This defense “is meant to be waged by the population and its institutions on the basis of advance preparation, planning, and training.” It is a “policy [in which] the whole population and the society’s institutions become the fighting forces. Their weaponry consists of a vast variety of forms of psychological, economic, social, and political resistance and counter-attack. This policy aims to deter attacks and to defend against them by preparations to make the society unrulable by would-be tyrants and aggressors. The trained population and the society’s institutions would be prepared to deny the attackers their objectives and to make consolidation of political control impossible. These aims would be achieved by applying massive and selective noncooperation and defiance. In addition, where possible, the defending country would aim to create maximum international problems for the attackers and to subvert the reliability of their troops and functionaries.”

The dilemma faced by all societies since the invention of war, namely, to either submit or become a mirror image of the attacking aggressor, is solved by unarmed civilian defense. In unarmed civilian defense, all cooperation is withdrawn from the invading power. Nothing works. The lights don’t come on, or the heat, the waste is not picked up, the transit system doesn’t work, courts cease to function, the people don’t obey orders. This is what happened in the “Kapp Putsch” in Berlin in 1920 when a would-be dictator and his private army tried to take over. The previous government fled, but the citizens of Berlin made governing so impossible that, even with overwhelming military power, the takeover collapsed in weeks. All power does not come from the barrel of a gun.

In some cases, sabotage against government property can be useful. When the French Army occupied Germany in the aftermath of World War I, German railway workers disabled engines and tore up tracks to prevent the French from moving troops around to confront large-scale demonstrations. If a French soldier got on a tram, the driver refused to move.

Two core realities support unarmed civilian defense; first, that all power comes from below — all government is by consent of the governed and that consent can always be withdrawn, causing the collapse of a governing elite. Second, if a nation is seen as ungovernable, because of a robust unarmed civilian defense force, there is no reason to try to conquer it. A nation defended by military power can be defeated in war by a superior military power. Countless examples exist. Examples also exist of peoples rising up and defeating ruthless dictatorial governments through nonviolent struggle, beginning with the liberation from an occupying power in India by Gandhi’s people power movement, continuing with the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines, the Soviet-backed dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and the Arab Spring, to name only a few of the most notable examples.

In unarmed civilian defense, all able adults are trained in methods of resistance. A standing reserve corps of millions is organized, making the nation so strong in its independence that no one would think of trying to conquer it. An unarmed civilian defense system is widely publicized and totally transparent to adversaries. An unarmed civilian defense system would cost a fraction of the amount now spent to fund a military defense system. Unarmed civilian defense can provide effective defense within a world dominated by a war system, while it is an essential component of a robust peace system.

The case of Lithuania offers some illumination of a way forward, but a warning as well. Having used nonviolent action to expel the Soviet military, the nation put in place an unarmed defense plan. But it has no plan to give military defense a backseat or to eliminate it. Militarists have been hard at work framing unarmed civilian defense as subsidiary to and in assistance of military action. We need nations to take unarmed defense as seriously as Lithuania, and then much more so. Nations without militaries — Costa Rica, Iceland, etc. –could come at this from the other end by developing unarmed civilian defense departments in place of nothing. But nations with militaries will have the harder task of developing unarmed civilian defense while knowing that an honest appraisal may require eliminating military defense. This task will be somewhat easier, however, as long as such nations are not at war.

The biggest hurdle, I think, is not simply ignorance of the substantial evidence in support of the effectiveness of unarmed civilian defense. The trouble is that when a government official becomes aware of the potential in training a population to non-cooperate with an unjust foreign occupation, within about five minutes that same government official realizes that such a population might not tolerate any injustices from its own national government. So, if you’re ignorant of unarmed civilian defense, you do not train your people in it, and if you learn about how it works, then you also do not train your people in it — unless, perhaps, you have a sincere interest in self-governance and justice, not just in “democracy” as a slogan or a piece of war propaganda. The struggle, then, would seem to be one of taking popular control of governments, making knowledge of civilian-based defense widespread, and then replacing war departments with unarmed defense departments. None of those steps will be easy, but what choice do we have?

Here in the United States at the moment, without any help from the national government and very little from state and local governments, people are trying to develop their own unarmed civilian defense organization to counter the aggression of ICE, the paramilitary that the U.S. government is using against its own people with a budget larger than any military on Earth other than those of the United States and China.

If we were to somehow achieve, globally, or in a particular country, an organized unarmed civilian defense solution to the problem of military invasion, there could still remain the problem of bombing. Even a people immune from being invaded will not want to risk being bombed. In common militaristic thinking, the way to avoid being bombed is to stockpile bombs as a deterrent — even at the risk of an accident as bad as any bombing. But what if that notion of deterrence is based on misguided assumptions rather than any evidence that it works or that it will always work?

There are nations that have given up nuclear weapons or ceased pursuing them and subsequently been attacked, such as Libya or Ukraine. But the evidence that nuclear weapons reliably deter war is weak. Pakistan and India obtained nuclear weapons in 1998 and went to war in 1999. The United States and Russia have fought numerous wars against other nations, and in Ukraine against each other (albeit with mainly Ukrainian troops on one side), and often threatened to use nuclear weapons. Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The United States has threatened to use them in North Korea and Iran. None of these threats seem to have been aimed at or to have achieved any deterrence, at least not any deterrence of non-nuclear war.

It is well established that nuclear weapons do not deter non-nuclear attacks, not by independent terrorists, not by non-nuclear nations, and not by nuclear nations. Nations’ possession of nuclear weapons does not make them more likely to win wars. In a study of 348 territorial disputes, nations with nuclear weapons were less, not more, successful than nations without nukes, and were no more successful than they had been prior to obtaining nukes. It’s a leap to conclude that nuclear weapons, which fail to deter all other types of attacks, have deterred nuclear attacks. It’s a correlation, nothing more.

Daniel Ellsberg told us how frequently U.S. presidents have publicly or privately threatened to use nuclear weapons, but not that doing so has deterred anything. Against terrorists who lack a territorial nation, the threat cannot even be attempted. But against nations, the threat is difficult to attempt because of the horrific shame that the world — to its infinite credit — will heap on the person publicly threatening to use nuclear weapons. And the attempt is difficult to make effective, because threats usually require examples, demonstrations. This is why you can read columns in newspapers suggesting that using one “small” nuclear weapons would teach everyone what they are. But if the whole purpose of using the one nuclear weapon were to prevent anyone ever using more of them, and if you could live with the shame of having used that one, and if — contrary to widespread predictions — using one didn’t result in using lots more, would anyone even then believe the threat to use them all or to use more of them?

The fantasy of shooting down missiles with missiles as a protection against nuclear war has fueled the arms race, created weapons that one side can call defensive and the other suspect are offensive, threatened the danger of an attack by any nation that convinces itself it is protected from retaliation, and — most importantly — failed dramatically to provide anything more than the possibility of partial protection, which means no protection at all when you’re talking about nuclear bombs getting through. These sorts of policies should call into question the idea that rational thinking dominates nuclear war planning.

The fact that World War III has not yet engulfed the world may not be evidence of nuclear deterrence, the very conception of which is arguably nonsensical. Nuclear deterrence, as its supporters explain it, depends on making yourself believe that someone else believes that you might do exactly what you are supposedly trying to avoid.

Author David Barash remarked: “Despite the fact that deterrence remains an article of faith among the ‘realists’ who have orchestrated U.S. strategic policy and who continue to do so, despite its incoherence and instability, much of this faith is lip service only, analogous to deeply religious individuals who profess belief in heaven, yet rarely rejoice when a loved one dies. Thus, if the U.S. government really believed in nuclear deterrence — or in the billions of dollars spent on Ballistic Missile Defense — there wouldn’t be such hyperventilating about the threat posed by a nuclear armed North Korea or possibly by Iran in the future.”

U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard once commented: “Here, I have made a little calculation. Assuming that we make a radioactive element that will live for five years and we just let it go into the air . . . forming a dust layer on the surface of the Earth, everybody would be killed. . . . And you may, of course, ask, ‘what is the practical importance of this? Who would want to kill everybody on Earth?’ I do not know whether we would be willing to do it, and I do not know whether the Russians would be willing to do it. But I think that we may threaten to do it. And I think that the Russians might threaten to do it. And who will take the risk, then, not to take that threat seriously?”

It’s unclear whether anyone has followed through on developing a single bomb to end all life on Earth, but each and every one of the tens of thousands of nuclear bombs in existence is, in a sense, that bomb. Most experts agree that any use of a nuclear bomb, even a so-called small or usable or tactical or limited bomb will almost certainly result in the use of others, with nobody able to control the escalation, and with even a “small” nuclear war a threat to all life on Earth via nuclear winter. Of course, I wouldn’t care if anyone were to threaten to use such things, as long as they never did, but the threats are not credible in a way that deters or coerces anything, while the risk of accidental or intentional use is nonetheless disastrously real.

Belief in deterrence has a poor record in other fields, suggesting a general tendency to place excess faith in it. In the 1920s the U.S. government effectively poisoned alcohol as a deterrent to drinking it. Surely nobody would risk death for a drink. But an estimated 10,000 people died as a result. In the 1970s the same geniuses tried poisoning marijuana, and if the aim was deterrence it largely failed. Lagging shamefully behind most of the world, the United States — like China — still uses capital punishment, claiming it is a deterrent. But, unlike nuclear war, capital punishment is something that can be tested in a wide variety of ways while still leaving most of humanity alive. There is overwhelming evidence that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent. It may deter someone from committing some crime, but does not deter most people. Failure to deter nuclear war is not something we can afford to fail at most of the time or even a single time. We cannot always rely on the people being threatened being more rational than the people doing the threatening.

Rather than through deterrence, the use of nuclear weapons can be avoided much better through disarmament — which is required by law, and is readily available to negotiate or to begin unilaterally. When the United States engaged in unilateral disarmament under Presidents John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush, Russia quickly reciprocated. Negotiated multi-party disarmament has worked in the past and can work now — even more easily, given the extent to which surveillance technology has made cheating more difficult.

The use of nuclear weapons is not survivable. Talk of usable nukes, of winning nuclear wars, and of nuclear wars restricted to certain parts of the world, is extremely misleading. A limited nuclear war would create a nuclear winter on much of the planet. Public safety messages like that produced by the City of New York suggesting that you can be safe in a nuclear war by going indoors are a public danger.

The failure of the U.S. government to apologize or change course since its bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is why Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu thought he could excuse genocide in Gaza by pointing to the nuclear bombing of Japan. The nuclear industry is making certain people rich, who are corrupting governments with their money. In so doing, they are putting all life on Earth at risk. We would almost certainly have a better chance of eliminating that risk if we were more united across borders.

Humans constitute a single species, Homo sapiens. While humanity has evolved a remarkable diversity of ethnic, economic, and political systems that enrich our shared existence, we are one people living together on a fragile planet. The biosphere that sustains life and civilization is astonishingly thin — comparable to the skin of an apple when viewed against the scale of the Earth. Within this delicate layer lies everything required for survival: clean air, fertile soil, fresh water, and the living systems that maintain balance and renewal. We all share one atmosphere, one interconnected ocean, one global climate system, and a finite supply of fresh water continually replenished through the planet’s hydrological cycle. We also share a vast biodiversity that sustains every form of life. Together, these form the biophysical commons on which civilization depends. This planetary life-support system is now gravely threatened. Protecting this fragile equilibrium is not a matter of choice but of collective survival. War is an optional crisis that governments create; protecting the environment is not optional — and requires unity that militarism impedes.

Safeguarding the commons is now the foremost responsibility of national governments and international institutions. Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon highlighted this in his Global Education First Initiative (GEFI, 2012), framing it through the lens of global citizenship. Global Citizenship Education (GCED) has since become a central pillar of UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development agenda, recognizing that peace, justice, human rights, and ecological balance are inseparable. True security rests not on national militarism but on shared stewardship of the global commons. The health of the global commons must take precedence over narrow national interest, because the latter now depends on the former.

The commons also encompass a social commons — the conditions that make just and peaceful coexistence possible. In systemic terms, this refers to the web of relationships that sustain human dignity, cooperation, and belonging. All must be safe if any are to be safe; the security of one is bound to the security of all. A just peace is one in which there is no fear of violent attack (war or civil war), exploitation, or political tyranny; where everyone’s basic needs are met and all have the right to participate in decisions that affect their lives. Such a society safeguards freedom of expression, gender equality, cultural diversity, and inclusive participation — the social foundations of lasting peace. Just as a healthy biophysical commons requires biological diversity, a healthy social commons requires social diversity.

Protecting the commons demands collaborative and participatory governance grounded in shared values, mutual respect, and responsibility for the planet’s well-being. When voluntary consensus fails — when individuals, corporations, or states disregard the common good, profit from violence, or degrade the environment — collective governance must intervene to uphold justice and restore balance. This is the role of legitimate institutions — laws, courts, and accountable systems of enforcement — not to dominate, but to protect what is held in common.

Humanity has reached a pivotal moment. Protecting the commons is now essential for both well-being and survival. Meeting this challenge requires renewed ethical foundations, inclusive institutions, and an expanded sense of identity that transcends borders and generations. It calls for the evolution of democratic global governance — new forms of association and cooperation among nations and peoples dedicated to safeguarding life on Earth.

Planetary citizenship also extends across generations. Protecting the commons today is inseparable from safeguarding the rights and well-being of those yet to come, whose lives will be shaped by the choices made now. Intergenerational justice demands that economies, technologies, and policies be guided by long-term responsibility rather than short-term gain. This principle — enshrined in the United Nations’ vision of sustainable development and reflected in many Indigenous worldviews — reminds humanity to act not as owners of the Earth but as its stewards and trustees.

War not only distracts from this vital task but directly undermines it. War and militarism are among the most destructive forces to the natural environment — burning fuel, poisoning land and water, and diverting resources from human and ecological needs. Militarism remains one of the world’s largest sources of pollution and carbon emissions, consuming vast wealth that could instead sustain peace and planetary balance. Yet conflict, while inevitable in human life, need not lead to war. Humanity has already developed nonviolent and cooperative methods of conflict transformation, diplomacy, and peacebuilding capable of replacing violence as instruments of security and governance.

Building planetary citizenship, therefore, means advancing a vision of common security: a world where every child can grow free from fear, want, and persecution, sustained by a thriving biosphere. One people, one planet, one peace — this is the essence of the new story humanity must tell. It marks the next stage in the evolution of civilization and consciousness. “One peace” does not imply a single imposed model of peace, but a shared commitment to pursuing peace by peaceful means — universally applicable yet locally rooted.

World BEYOND War, the organization I direct, coordinates dozens of chapters and maintains partnerships with over 100 affiliates around the world. WBW functions through a decentralized, distributed grassroots organizing model focused on building power at the local level. We don’t have a central office and we all work remotely. WBW’s staff, based all over the world, provide tools, trainings, and resources to empower the chapters and affiliates to organize in their own communities based on what campaigns resonate most with their members, while at the same time organizing towards the long-term goal of war abolition.

Key to World BEYOND War’s work is holistic opposition to the institution of war at large — not only all current wars and violent conflicts, but the industry of war itself, the ongoing preparations for war that feed the profitability of the system (for example, arms manufacturing, weapons stockpiling, and the expansion of military bases). This holistic approach, focused on the institution of war as a whole, sets WBW apart from many other organizations.

Our ever-evolving theory of change is partially outlined in our book A Global Security System: An Alternative to War and in the short summary version thereof.

We work locally and globally, using education, nonviolent activism, and [media](https://worldbeyond/