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Friends and family speak in hushed tones these days about the horrific arms race that has militarized our economies, and those of most nations, while pushing us ever closer to catastrophic war.
We must forcefully and confidently sketch out a new vision for our common future, starting with the United States, starting with peace, one that gives hope to humanity and that provides a path forward towards peace and cooperation, and not war and competition.
But that is not where we are now under the militarist and benighted Biden administration.
And it is not where we will be under a militarist and unhinged Trump administration.
We the people, starting with morally committed intellectuals with the background to understand geopolitics and institutions at home and abroad, must create a new American foreign policy, and security policy, that is not rooted in expansion and exploitation, in contracts for military hardware, or in the creation of conflict and strife for profit.
When NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced about the NATO Defence Ministers’ Summit held on June 14 that it was focused on deploying nuclear weapons against Russia and China, and ending all possibility of dialog concerning the unlimited buildup of armaments aimed at selected “opponents,” he demonstrated a recklessness, a blindness, and an unaccountability that we have not seen since the crazed drive for war exactly one hundred and ten years ago in July of 1914.
The militaries of the major nations are now on remote control, dumping the precious wealth of their citizens into the molds for tanks, fighter planes, and missiles, and we are all pulled towards the brink through the activation of classified agreements for intelligence sharing and military cooperation that demand obedience to an unaccountable opaque chain of command, one that imposes a continuity of government plan beyond the reach of all but a handful of people.
Just as we did in 1914, we risk being dragged into confrontation that is manipulated by speculators behind the scenes, a military buildup for the profit of the multinational banks and the bloated billionaires who hide their bellies behind those facades.
The signs of military mobilization across Europe, and the world, are visible in spite of all these secret agreements. Most can already sense the growth of a war economy beneath our feet.
When Pranay Vaddi, senior director for arms control at the US National Security Council, stated on June 7,
“In their outright refusal to even discuss arms control, Russia and the PRC are failing to meet their international obligations. Practically speaking, they are forcing the United States and our close allies and partners to prepare for a world where nuclear competition occurs without numerical constraints.”
He was making it up. It is simply not true that Russia and China refuse to discuss arms control. Rather the United States, along with war mongering factions around the world, including in Russia and China, have embraced the assumption that an unlimited nuclear buildup, and arms buildup, will bring them personal wealth and institutional power.
There are literally no people left in Washington who are dedicated to true arms control and nonproliferation. Disarmament, the most critical part of the equation, is now a taboo topic for Americans.
Unlike the Cold War era, there are no longer any people in government who have witnessed the horrors of total war. When National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, or the CEO of the Center for a New American Security Michèle Flournoy make their backroom deals to enrich their clients, whether private equity or military contractors, their dull faces reveal that after years of embracing complete lies, they are capable of just about anything—and no one around them has any idea how to stop this sort of drive for world war at the highest level by carefully organized operatives working for cynical financial interests.
Everyone knows, if they do not say so, that the complete failure of the Ukraine’s military in its war against Russia, that brilliant strategy hatched up at RAND and DARPA to enfeeble Russia, could completely undo the current power structure in Washington DC that was set up after 9/11, and reinforced by the Covid-19 regime. If the post-9/11Washington order falls apart, that would endanger the billionaires themselves. And therefore, a world war, or the threat of one, is seen as the only way for the wealthy to cling to power granted the rising opposition at home.
Of course, just as in 1914, they assure themselves that ultimately war will not happen, that the other side will back down once they face catastrophe, or make secret deals. However, what we know from 1914 is that once the preparation for war passes a certain threshold, the chain of command shifts from the bankers to the generals and the generals, once impowered, follow orders like clockwork.
What we need now is not simply to explain what these psychopaths are doing, nor to merely understand the decadent and mindless system in which they thrive. Nor is it enough to say that they have gone too far, that we must go back to the more reasonable America of some romanticized age.
No! We must firmly declare that there will be an entirely new vision for what the United States will do, and that we will act on it now. We cannot wait for another botched election because the institutions of government today are but hollowed out shells, their guts devoured by the maggots of Black Stone, Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard and a hundred other parasitic creatures who have turned government into a feast for their clients, and a weapon to be used against the people, and against humanity, in an insane drive for power and glory.
We must start with a proposal to end the madness, and the first step must be a proposal for a set of enforceable arms control treaties that not only take us back to where we were in the 1990s, but that take us into the future as well.
Three sets of international treaties for arms control, disarmament, the control of emerging technologies, and international security will be announced here in the near future.
Set One:
The full implementation of existing treaties and proposals for treaties for arms control and disarmament
1) International treaties limiting conventional weapons
2) International treaties limiting, and then eliminating, nuclear weapons
3) Treaty on lethal autonomous weapons systems
4) Ban on weapons in space
5) Ban on landmines and cluster bombs
Set Two:
Proposals for new treaties that address emerging weapons and their proliferation
1) Treaty limiting the use of radioactive substances
2) Treaty banning nano-weapons
3) Treaty regulating drones, robots, and satellites, and banning the most dangerous versions
4) Treaty banning the use of energy weapons
5) Treaty banning bioweapons
6) International treaty banning weather modification programs
7) Strict international regulation of GMO technology and ban on GMO weapons
Set Three:
Treaties and agreements that bring the quest for international peace and security up to date
1) Treaty banning super-computer assisted mass psychological operations
2) Treaty banning the military use of Antarctica, the Artic, the oceans, and other wildlands
3) Ban on secret treaties for diplomatic and security cooperation
4) Bring the definition of the actors making political and security decisions up to date through a revision of the language of international law and treaties
5) International treaty that establishes clear institutional walls domestically and internationally between a) finance, b) scientific research, c) the development and manufacture of weapons, and d) healthcare and medical treatment.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments.
Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
