Episode 49 - How We Can Stem the Tide of War

Our world is unraveling at an accelerating pace. War and conflict are spreading like contagion, ravaging the face of the earth. Our efforts to stop the contagion have hitherto been ineffectual as we reach for the same outworn playbooks over and over again. And yet, we can and must act quickly to stop the contagion and the heartrending suffering it brings. It is time to understand and shed the habits that have held us back and take bold new steps and try new paths we have never considered before. Join me as we explore once such path together.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. Welcome to this episode with me, your host, Sovaida Maani. Today I hope to cover with you an idea about how we might stem the path of war that we're on, the scourge of war, the tide of war by pursuing a new path that we have never pursued before, by trying something innovative, something new that requires a lot of courage. Before I dive in, I wanted to let you all know that these podcasts, the Reimagining Our World Series is now available on all your audio podcast platforms, in addition to being available on the CPGG YouTube channel. So it just makes it easier for you all to listen to these podcasts. We're now at episode 49, which is quite exciting given that I started this initiative in the first year of COVID. Seems like an eternity ago now. All right, I wanted to start by offering you an insight that I gleaned from reading some really interesting material from a gentleman by the name of Sean Aker, who was a Harvard researcher in positive psychology. You may have heard of him. He conducted the most popular course on Harvard's campus, on happiness. He's got some very interesting materials that he has gleaned himself as a result of his many years of research. And there was one thing that I wanted to hone in on, because I thought we might think about how we could leverage it and apply it to tackling one of the biggest scourges of our time, which is war and conflict. Let's start by looking at the kernel of the idea offered by Sean Aker. He says that in times of crisis and adversity, our kneejerk response is to do one of two things. The first thing we tend to do is to repeat the same dysfunctional behavior that got us into trouble in the first place. He calls this the first path. Our second knee-jerk behavior in similar circumstances, i.e., in response to crisis and adversity, is to take a few steps back to undo a lot of the progress that we've made to unravel the achievements that we have made. In other words, we regress. He calls this the second path. Now he suggests that instead of falling into the trap of pursuing the first path or the second path, what we should really be doing is using the momentum of failure. So as we are spiraling down, failing, use that momentum to catapult ourselves in a new direction, what he calls the third direction, or the third path, which is essentially a direction that we have never considered before. It's really important, something we've never considered before. What we tend to do is we take all things we've done and we tweak them here and we tweak them there and a little modification or maybe we take away a couple of things and we try again. And this approach to tackling global problems, especially the problem of war, simply has not worked. In other words, what he's suggesting is that we use crises and the downward spiral of failure as a catalyst for creative thinking and bold new action. Now to doing this involves a mindset, creating a new mindset. Which means that we've gotta be willing to view failure, not as failure--"Woe is us! We failed," but as a"Yippie! This is an opportunity for growth. What can we do differently to really grow?" It also involves a second habit of thought, and that is to be boldly creative. As Albert Einstein famously said,"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." So we've gotta adopt an entirely new way of thinking. As somebody said, it's not even a question of thinking outside the box. We've gotta get rid of the box altogether, the whole concept of the box. The outcome when we do this is that tests, that come to all of us in life, either in our individual lives or societally as a collective whole, can be turned from stumbling blocks into stepping stones towards a better future. And this is the key thing to hold onto. This is the key idea, because honestly, when we're failing, we tend to feel helpless and hopeless. And when we feel those things, we stop believing that a solution even exists. And so we don't bother looking for it. So this is a key component, believing that something is possible, believing that a more peaceful and secure world is possible. Now, I was racking my brains thinking about what example could I come up with, or let me test Mr. Aker's proposition out. So what illustration can I come up with that demonstrates the truth of what he's asserting in terms of the first path and second path and third path? And the example I landed on was that of Brexit. So if you'll indulge me for a second, I want to share with you my thoughts here. After Britain's painful divorce from the EU, we saw each of these three paths play out. Let's look at the first path, which was repeating the same behavior. Some countries in the EU wanted to continue the same policies and patterns that had alienated Britain from the EU instead of undertaking reform in an attempt to reel Britain back in. So that was the first path. Regarding the second path, there were certain countries, like Poland, who were calling for steps to reclaim greater autonomy for EU member states, giving them more freedom from Brussels over their internal affairs. By doing so, they would be undoing the hard won progress in the direction of deeper European integration. The European project has really been a drive, if you step back and zoom out, it's been a drive to towards deeper European integration-- which by the way, was consonant with the vision of its founding father, Jean Monet, whose brainchild it was-- that links would be created in an ever increasing chain of integration in the European Union, leading eventually in his mind and so he hoped to a European Federation along the lines of the United States of America. So a United States of Europe. So what about the third path in the context of Brexit? This is what is so fascinating. During the whole saga of Brexit, there were calls heard for a third path to be pursued toward collective growth, marked by deeper integration. One of the places we saw and heard this call was in the groundbreaking report produced by the then French and German foreign ministers, Jean- Marc Ayrault and Frank Walter Steinmeyer. In this report, they acknowledged the following-- I find it really interesting-- that Europe was in the crucible of a severe test from which they were confident it would emerge stronger than ever. So just this ability to conceptualize what an entire group of nations, association of Nations is going through, a confederation,as being in the crucible of a test I found really interesting. They then went on to say that they viewed the crisis caused by Brexit as an opportunity. So there we are, opportunity for growth, an opportunity to develop common answers to their common challenges. Consequently, they called for closer cooperation on matters relating to defense, security and intelligence sharing, the joint patrolling of external borders, a common migration and asylum policy. These were all issues that had been critical to Britain's decision to withdraw from the European Union. They also called for harmonization of corporation tax and other financial reforms. In fact, they were so positive in their outlook that they went as far as to confidently predict that the countries of the EU would move further to toward political integration in union. In other words, furthering the direction of Jean Monet's original vision for it. We all know the story. Britain ultimately opted to leave in 2020, and yet the remaining 27 members of the union still have the option of working toward a more deeply integrated EU, which they're being forced to do by dint of circumstance, especially the war in Ukraine. And they need to do this by reforming certain key areas. There is always the possibility that if such reforms were to take place, Britain might at some point wish to rejoin a stronger, better EU sometime in the future. One can hope. Now, why is all this relevant? It's all relevant to a particularly grim challenge that the global community is facing and has been facing for a number of years, and which is just deepening. The trouble of war and conflict, which is like a contagion that is rippling through the world. It's a conflagration, and the fires are getting worse and worse. A lot of people are dying. A lot of people are suffering unnecessarily, and so we need to put our thinking caps on and come up with some effective solutions. So I was thinking that we could take Sean Aker's insights about our knee-jerk reactions and apply them in this arena and see what we come up with. But first we need to be aware of what we're doing. So let's look at what we're doing in this context, viewed through the prism of Aker's analysis. As the world rapidly unravels around us, and as the storm clouds of war and carnage cover this ever widening swathe of humanity, we see that feelings of insecurity and fear have gripped us in all continents, Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, et cetera. Now let's look at our knee-jerk responses-- the first path. We have indeed reached and continue to reach for the tried and true solution of amassing greater quantities of arms: more arms for Ukraine, more arms for Russia, more for all the NATO countries, more for Taiwan, more for China, more for the United States, more for countries in Africa, and on and on it goes This behavior is self-defeating and self-destructive, because the more arms we amass, the greater the chance that we will use them either deliberately or by accident. We've been down this road before so many times, and especially in the lead up to the First World War and the Second World War. We see what happens when there's this global mobilization of arms and troops, and the machinery of war gets rolling. Inevitably, it is going to be used. Nowhere is this more apparent and dangerous than in the acquisition of capabilities to build nuclear facilities that can be easily diverted from providing civilian nuclear energy to military use, the building of atomic bombs. And indeed an increasing number of countries is seeking ways to acquire nuclear knowhow and acquire their own nuclear facilities in which they can enrich uranium or extract plutonium, both of which are essential ingredients for building an atom bomb. Now let's look at the second path, the path of regress, not doing the same, but undoing gains and progress made. We're starting to see a really dangerous trend of withdrawal from international humanitarian disarmament treaties to be more specific. In March of this year, 2025, a statement was made by the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland, and Poland have expressed a similar desire to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty on landmines that has been ratified by a hundred and sixty four countries and came into force in 1999. Now, while countries are allowed to withdraw from this treaty, so long as they give six months notice, and as long as they're not already involved in armed conflict, this is a very dangerous precedent. In addition, Lithuania has also already withdrawn from the convention on cluster munitions, to which the other Baltic states are not signatories, and Poland has now also said it's considering withdrawing from the same treaty. Cluster munitions and landmines are extremely destructive. Cluster munitions can be dropped from aircraft or fired from artillery. They explode midair and they scatter bomblets over a very wide area. Many fail to detonate and effectively act as landmines that can be detonated many years down the road. The people who suffer the most from both landmines and cluster munitions are civilians, especially women and children who are out in the fields or children who are out playing. They come across one of these things and it explodes and they lose their limbs or faces and heads, and so on. It's very gruesome, which is why the world decided on humanitarian grounds to create these conventions to ban both landmines and cluster munitions. Now, here's the interesting part. These countries who have stated a desire to withdraw or have already withdrawn from one or other, these two treaties say that they do this with a heavy heart, but that they don't see another way. That statement they don't see another way is critical and it jibes perfectly with Sean Aker's statement that in the second path, when we regress, we get myopic. Fear grips us when we're in the throes of a crisis. We don't see other solutions. We become very narrowly focused and the only way we can see is to undo some of the progress we've made, which is not the best way to go, to put it mildly. So these countries cite the escalating tensions with Russia and the growing security concerns along NATO's Eastern border, all of which are entirely understandable. They feel the need to reassess, therefore, their defense strategies in order to give them more flexibility and freedom to respond more effectively to the potential military threats. And in fact, Lavia was blunt enough to say that having observed the war in Ukraine, they've seen that in Ukraine, the use by Ukraine of anti personnel landmines when combined with other weaponry and mines has been effective in increasing the strength of the defense forces by delaying the advance of the Russian military. So this is their analysis, right?"We need to do whatever it takes." And the other principle that we've covered at length in one of these episodes, the false premise that the ends always justify the means, as opposed to what we propose as an alternative, that the means must always be as worthy as the ends. So here you have a stark example of how that is playing out real time, even as we speak. Now, if there's any doubt that this is a regression, the European Commission didn't want to castigate these nations or criticize them, but they did note that since 2023-- so this is 2025 and the announcement was made in March 2025-- so over the last two years, it has contributed over 174 million euros to humanitarian mine action, including 97 million euros, specifically from mine clearance. Honestly, think of the craziness of this. On the one hand, we are spending an enormous amount of money to clear mines because we recognize how destructive and dangerous they are. And on the other hand, we are withdrawing from the mine conventions and the cluster munition convention on the ground that we want to have the freedom and flexibility to put down landmines and use cluster munitions. It just honestly makes no sense. It's like somebody setting a house on fire, then getting the fire brigade in to put the flames out and then immediately lighting the next match, and doing this over and over again. It truly is in some sense a picture of insanity. This is insane behavior and at the very least what we can agree that it is behavior that does not make much sense. Surely there's got to be a better way. Now, I did say that it's understandable that these nations have a lot of fear, and it truly is understandable. It's also understandable in the sense that we have a system in which not everybody abides by the same rules. So we know that Russia, for instance, has used both cluster munitions and landmines in its conflict with Ukraine. So surely the answer isn't then to make it a free for all and go back to the primitive days when anybody can use any means to wreak havoc and destruction and to win a conflict or a war. There's got to be a better way that is more consonant with humanity's increasing progress towards maturity, collective maturity: by creating a system that applies even-handedly to everyone, in which there are rules that allow for enforcement of the provisions that everybody agrees to. Otherwise, right now we have a situation where this action by a few upstanding countries can send a negative signal to other countries who are also in armed conflict that adhering to these conventions isn't really that important, and we don't really need to continue doing this, so we too will withdraw from the treaty. And then where are we? So what is the potential third path, which is really the crux of this presentation and what we're driving towards. There is another way. It is the only untried and yet, I believe, viable solution to ensuring that all nations everywhere feel secure, which is what they all claim that they're seeking, and they can therefore stop wasting their precious resources, be they financial or human resources, human bodies basically on feeding the machine of war. This third path was originally suggested in the second part of the 19th century by a Persian nobleman. He made this proposal before humanity had even gone through and experienced a world war. He articulated the need for nations to come together and enter into a binding international covenant, in which they would do several things. The first was that they would limit the amount of arms that each would have to the amount necessary to preserve order within their borders. Then all the excess arms would be destroyed. And we can talk about how this could be unpacked. In fact, we've talked about this in other sessions, that it would need to be done under international supervision to ensure that all nations were honest brokers and complied with their commitments under the treaty and who that international body is. We also have had conversations about, so if you go back through the episodes and their headings, you will see what they are. Then there would be a universal agreement on a principle of collective security. In other words, that if one nation party to this agreement, and it's universal agreements, so all nations need to be party or at least a good majority, that if one nation were to flout the provisions of this agreement, all the nations would unitedly arise to bring it to heal, because they would not allow one nation to disrupt the peace of the world. So it's like acting quickly. When you have a cancer diagnosis, you don't wait for those cancerous cells to proliferate. You immediately step in and, surgically if you can, remove those cells and then go in if necessary, and zap the rest with pretty harsh chemicals because the life of the entire body, and in this case, the wellbeing of humanity is at stake. There was also a proposal by this nobleman for the creation of a permanent international police force composed of forces from all nations of the world who would also contribute armaments and so on, according to an agreement that was obviously depending on their capacities and so on. The decisions about when and how to use this force would be made collectively through a global legislature that would be representative of all the countries and peoples of the world. So this idea of collective action: collective agreement, first of all, on what the rules are. Collective action through a collective mechanism of an international standing force or permanent police force. And the decision making is also made by a body that collectively represents all the peoples of the world. In other words, individual nations no longer have the right to use force. This is really interesting. So in short, the ingredients we need, I believe that the key ingredients we need in order to pursue avidly a third path, including the third path proposed here of this global system of collective security, is to have a vision born of creativity, coupled with the belief that arriving at the vision is possible. And thirdly, the courage to take a new path that has never been taken before. This is what I call the success formula. Frankly, the alternative is untenable. The only true question is how much more are we willing to suffer and make other people suffer before we take the opportunity of exercising our free will to bring about constructive changes that lead to peace. Now if these are ideas that resonate with you and you'd like to learn more and to have a further infusion of hope, I would invite you to pick up a copy of The Alchemy of Peace which essentially will give you many more reasons to hope that building a better world is possible. It's available on Amazon, wherever you are in the world, both in digital form and paperback. All right thank you for being here today and please engage with this material by putting in your comments on the YouTube channel. And also remember that you can listen to this podcast in audio form as you go for a walk or walk around your home doing chores, and hopefully it will inspire and uplift you. Bye-bye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.