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 a 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 paradigm shift, taking place right before our eyes, can be hard to see, because it involves the suffering of masses of people who seem distant, just as it is hard to see that we too, and our children, may suffer equally down the time-stream from paying insufficient attention to the climate challenge.
The shift includes the realization that everyone on Earth, citizens and governments, makes their contribution to the potentiality of nuclear war and various climate disasters according to individual and collective decisions.
If a nuclear war could destroy all of us, what is the utility of such a war? If we are damaging the Earth’s ecosystems to a point of no return, what does that reveal about our approach to economics? 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 “negotiate” a disgraceful deal to end the war in Ukraine without the involvement of Europe or Ukraine itself.
All the limitations in the global security system are revealed by Putin’s aggression—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 heel, and the reality that the U.S. president is both hungry for approval as a peacemaker even as he and his colleagues seem hopelessly out of their depth. Any thinking person has to be disgusted by what Trump and Witkoff and Rubio are offering Zelensky.
At the same time this war which indiscriminately kills 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 the opposing conceptions of security whirling us through the maelstrom of this necessity for a deep shift in our priorities? 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 are an immense distraction from the real challenge of climate. Such wars are a monumental failure of the human capacity to see ourselves in the other and work together to resolve our differences peacefully for the sake of what will benefit all.
Putin and Trump are representatives of this tragic failure 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 yet another occasion for nuclear brinksmanship or far worse?
Beyond the shift lies a world where the trillions spent on war and weapons are redirected toward meeting human needs directly. Such a huge change 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, each responsible for all, the required shift will gather momentum. It will overcome the cynical and ignorant masters of war and redirect our creative energies toward the real challenge of making our peace with the Earth so that it can continue to sustain us into the next phase of the human story. Even then, 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. Fortunately the Earth itself has equally immense self-healing capabilities if we work with it.
The commonality of self-interest under the looming risk of potential nuclear or climate disaster can even be seen as an opportunity: we can acknowledge the necessity and the possibility for the kind of cooperation that will result, if we want it badly enough, in authentic global security.
