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militarism
The US Kicks Off World’s Largest Naval War Games: RIMPAC, China, and the Cost of War
Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
Jul 14, 2026
June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercises, the world's largest international naval war games. Led by the US, the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, five submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of US preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.
At the same time, the US and partner nations kicked off the 10-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.
At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: There is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heatwaves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.
This past week, while US military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Coming only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.
Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”
These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of US military activity have caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.
Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the US continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to "deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”
The US conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the US military's economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1% in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land's estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the US military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.
Similarly, US militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The US military controls roughly 27% of the island's land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS" forever chemicals" linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam's drinking water wells, threatening the island's primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.
These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the US strategy of "peace through strength." Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.
The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify US-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.
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When Will the US Truly Face War's Moral Consequences?
Can we open the national soul and become aware that those who died were loving people who deserved to live?
Jul 10, 2026
When is the last time the US government, or a fragment thereof, has truly been held accountable—not merely legally or politically, but morally accountable—for an act of violence, for its addiction to violence? Ever?
And what might that even mean?
These are not questions I’ve ever even asked until I began learning about a lawsuit that has been filed against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director David Venturella. Technically, it’s a freedom of speech lawsuit, but it’s also so much more than that. At least that’s how it seemed to me, the more I learned about it.
The suit pulls back horrible January and the invasion of Minneapolis, aka, Operation Metro Surge, when armed and masked members of ICE and Customs and Border Protection began occupying the Twin Cities for the purpose of snatching and deporting (“allegedly”) undocumented immigrants, creating immense fear and chaos everywhere, and leading to huge protests.
This is militarism. The enemy dead are hidden behind patriotic propaganda and soon vanish from collective awareness. They’re subhuman; they’re evil.
As everyone knows, two of the protesters were murdered: Renee Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24. This was too much. The nation was outraged. The murders, combined with the fact that most of the arrestees were found to be in the US legally, quieted down the invasion—though hardly ending the arrests and deportations.
Five months later, David Streever, of Rochester, New York, was contacted—much to his stunned surprise—by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, who gave him a “Warning Notice: You May Be in Violation of Federal Law.”
Turns out, many months earlier, in the wake of the two protest murders, he had sent an email, titled, “What’ Next,” to Todd Lyons, who was the acting ICE director at the time. As quoted in The New York Times, this is part of what Streever wrote:
The director “will never know peace (and) will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher”—referencing the Nazi SS security chief, who is considered to be a principal architect of the Holocaust.
“Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness,” the email read.
“You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
Sit with these words for a while. Yeah, I found them shocking. I even momentarily wondered if they had gone too far. But notice: There’s no actual threat in the words. Instead, the email is both a moral condemnation and a psycho-spiritual warning. Murder always comes back to haunt the perpetrator. As Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is filing the freedom-of-speech suit, put it: This is not a threat in any way, but a plea to the ICE director to recognize what he has done. And, I would add, take responsibility for it, rather than try to make it vanish by turning the deaths—plus the shattered lives of thousands of deportees—into abstractions.
Indeed, Streever’s email challenges the basic, media-perpetuated belief that nationally committed deaths—mostly via war—are indeed an abstraction, and the more there are, the more abstract they become. I’m glad the email has gone public. This is a far bigger issue than freedom of speech, but the lawsuit is making this forgotten exchange public.
But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.
This applies collectively. In the last three years, about 60 detainees have died in detention cells, according to ICE’s own statistics, described on their website as “detained alien deaths.” But these deaths are not abstractions. Nor are the thousands of alleged “aliens” arrested—pulled from their families—every day. Can we open the national soul, just as Streever pleaded with the ICE director to open his soul? This means being aware that the consequences come home... and beyond that, those who died were loving people who deserved to live.
Consider these words of Bita Iuliano, writing recently about the military jets flying over the nation’s capital, where she lives, that were part of the country’s 250th birthday celebration. Seven hours of flyovers were scheduled for July 4. “These flyovers,” she writes, are “an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a ‘show.’”
She went on:
As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran.
The Iranian children, she pointed out, knew, as they covered their ears and cuddled, that this could be the last day of their lives. For too many of them, that’s exactly what it was.
This is militarism. The enemy dead are hidden behind patriotic propaganda and soon vanish from collective awareness. They’re subhuman; they’re evil. They’re radical leftists. We have no choice but to kill them, over and over and over. At least 7,300 Iranians (so far). More than 70,000 Palestinians.
People have a right to protest this, to voice their opinions. They also have the right to make moral values public—no matter how much fear this creates for those who are “above” such values.
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Cut the Pentagon, Save the Planet: The $1.5 Trillion Climate Solution We Can’t Ignore
What could we do with that money instead?
Jul 09, 2026
Last week, millions of people around the world were subjected to record-breaking heatwaves. At least 25 deaths in the U.S. from this heat dome were reported. The French government also counted over 2,000 excess deaths during the June heatwaves. At the same time, this past weekend, a devastating super typhoon hit the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, leaving islands like Rota, where 2,000 people live, without running water and most buildings impacted.
In both cases, the people least responsible for the climate crisis are the most vulnerable to its effects. And in both cases, people’s ability to withstand crises has been made dramatically worse by militarization. Those most threatened by heatwaves are too often in neighborhoods subjected to militarized policing, economic abandonment, and the exploitation of their communities. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are occupied by the U.S. military and subjected to environmentally destructive bases and training exercises.
These climate disasters are not new, but they are coming at a moment when we have an opportunity to do something about them. Congress will soon vote on the Pentagon budget. This year’s proposed budget is an obscene $1.5 trillion, and the cumulative amount of military spending would be even higher. For the first time in years, there will likely be a notable number of Democratic Party votes against it. Senator Ed Markey has also introduced a bill to cut it in half. Cutting this budget could be one of the only pieces of climate policy that can meet the speed and scale of the climate crisis. Fighting it could open up new organizing terrains and break down movement silos that have prevented traction for so long.
Even without redistributing that $1.5 trillion, cutting the Pentagon’s budget could do wonders for the planet. The Pentagon is the world’s largest institutional polluter. It has over 800 bases worldwide. Each base acts as part of the permanent enforcement mechanism for the fossil fuel industry, driving ecocidal resource wars and entrenching U.S. corporate dominance in oil- and mineral-rich regions. This budget also opens a direct line of funding for more data centers that poison communities and drive further resource wars to power them. At least $30 billion is requested for direct Department of War-owned data centers, over $58 billion is requested for AI capabilities more broadly, and over half of the proposed budget is going to private weapons contractors whose AI programs are directly supported by the data centers being developed around the country. Companies building these centers, like OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon Web Services, have all passed their own multi-billion-dollar deals with the Pentagon.
What could we do with that money instead? The scale of the Pentagon’s environmental destruction and its financial power is unfathomable; each of those 800 bases has generations of stories of destruction, displacement, and long-term illness. Each transaction covers multiple continents. And so the scale of possibility — what we could do alternatively with these resources — is equally immense.
According to the National Priorities Project, the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget could fund a year’s solar electricity for 1.92 billion homes, for instance. And according to the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), the proposed $500 billion increase alone could cover 60% of U.S. homes. $500 billion could also end the wildfire crisis in California and restore 100 million acres of forest. Of course, the current oil-motivated wars, like the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran, are quite costly. The CCI report estimates that as of early April 2026, the $37 billion that the U.S. had spent on the assault on Iran could have paid for pre-k for every four-year-old in the country, green retrofits for 2,000 public schools, and over double the cost of restoring Trump’s cuts to SNAP benefits.
We can also point to other pathways for addressing the climate crisis: Instead of funding missile development, we could fund clean technology development. The land taken up by massive, sprawling, and toxic bases could be cleaned up and devoted to cultural sites, schools, agro-ecological farms, regenerative production, and the return of land to indigenous sovereignty and stewardship. New jobs and training programs could be created in all of these areas while, of course, avoiding false solutions such as carbon credits, carbon capture technology, and nuclear energy.
Without more money to new bases increasingly encircling China, we could collaborate on green technology instead of starting a new ecocidal cold war, and we could stop trampling on the sovereignty of countries throughout the Asia-Pacific like the Northern Mariana Islands. We could move toward a fossil fuel treaty and work with extremely vulnerable countries being occupied and sanctioned, like Cuba, to move their own holistic climate adaptation plans forward.
Fossil fuel supply chains are global, as is the impact of the U.S. military. Many states in the Global South continue to be dominant producers of fossil fuels due to debt traps and sanctions. Global climate finance could help alleviate that debt and fund a transition to truly renewable energy, free from the reproduction of violent extraction often enacted through the mining of so-called “critical” minerals (often deemed “critical” for the sake of military usage), also carried out in states like New Mexico and on indigenous territory.
This is, of course, just a sliver of what is possible, based on projects, blueprints, and visions already developed by those on the front lines of the climate crisis for decades. In recent years, these visions have been defined and revised in the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, The Red Deal, and A People’s Green New Deal. This year’s People’s Declaration for a Rapid, Just, and Equitable Transition was developed from a global summit made up of 900 civil society organizations in Santa Marta, Colombia. Notably, its 12th principle emphasizes the irreplaceable and central role of dismantling U.S. imperialism and militarism globally within the much larger framework for confronting the climate crisis — we can and should be just as clear-eyed in our organizing.
When we cut the Pentagon budget, we can be imaginative. We can see a world where the iron claw of extraction is weakened, and we can begin building something new in its place. The Pentagon budget is a clear target, with the potential to address rising environmental, economic, and public health crises globally. At a time when most environmental policy is almost impossible to pass at the federal level, we can fight against this Pentagon budget and choose to breathe new life into our movements and our world.
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An Open Letter to NATO: The False Promise of Militarized Security
NATO’s leaders would do well to remember that true security is not measured in the size of an arsenal, but in the strength of the societies it claims to protect.
Jul 08, 2026
As NATO convenes once again to double down on military spending, arms production, and the logic of deterrence through superior firepower—this despite the alliance’s own members having repeatedly used force in violation of international law in recent years, in Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, and the open-ended War on Terror—it is worth asking: What kind of security are we actually buying?
These interventions, often justified under the guise of humanitarianism or collective defense, have in practice destabilized entire regions, fueled insurgencies, and visited immense suffering upon some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. The result is a perverse paradox of an alliance that presents itself as the guardian of a rules-based order but has, through its own actions, undermined that very order, deepening the insecurity it claims to combat.
The record is unambiguous: Militarized security is reactive, not preventive. It treats symptoms—territorial disputes, insurgencies, great-power rivalry—while ignoring root causes such as inequality, resource scarcity, political exclusion, and the erosion of trust in institutions. The post-1945 era, for all its flaws, demonstrated that stability is not the product of arms races, but of norms, institutions, and the rule of law.
The relative peace among liberal democracies, the decline in international armed conflicts, and the gradual expansion of human rights all occurred not because states built bigger arsenals, but because they built stronger frameworks for cooperation. International organizations—including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the International Court of Justice—have encouraged cooperation and stability, while aircraft carriers or hypersonic missiles have mainly spread terror and destruction. Yet as NATO attempts to expand its influence these very institutions of social cooperation are under attack by the same NATO member states who have cut funding and even withdrawn from the organizations in some cases.
What we require is a legal framework that serves as the foundation for a truly equitable international community—one that enforces cooperation over competition, shared development over extraction, and the rights of all people over the privileges of a few.
The opportunity cost of this militarized approach urged by NATO is staggering. The combined military expenditure of NATO members now exceeds $1.3 trillion annually according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Reports indicates this is a figure that dwarfs the estimated $40 billion needed to close the global gaps in education, healthcare, and food security.
For the price of a single nuclear-powered submarine, a nation could fund universal pre-kindergarten for its entire population for a year. For the cost of a new fighter jet squadron, it could eliminate malaria in an entire region. These are not moral abstractions; they are strategic failures.
Study after study has shown that spending on healthcare, education, and renewable energy generates far greater economic multipliers in terms of job creation and GDP growth than equivalent spending on defense. Military expenditure distorts economies, prioritizing a narrow industrial base of contractors and exporters over diversified, sustainable development. It exacerbates inequality by funneling public resources into capital-intensive sectors that benefit elites, while social services—hospitals, schools, public transit—suffer from chronic underfunding. When citizens see their tax dollars funding bombs rather than bridges, cynicism replaces civic engagement, and the very legitimacy of a country’s governance is undermined.
International law, which has been a strong impetus to cooperation in the world and which can provide fundamental rules of fairness, has been used as an instrument to promote militarization and violence in the world by the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world.
The path forward demands a radical reimagining of international law—not as it is currently wielded by powerful states to justify intervention, enforce economic dependency, or entrench global hierarchies, but as a tool for genuine equity, cooperation, and shared prosperity.
Today, international law is too often a weapon of the strong, invoked selectively to punish adversaries while ignoring the transgressions of allies. This is not the international law we need. What we require is a legal framework that serves as the foundation for a truly equitable international community—one that enforces cooperation over competition, shared development over extraction, and the rights of all people over the privileges of a few.
Such a system must prioritize binding agreements on climate change to ensure our natural environment is protected not as a luxury but as a fundamental right. A fair international legal system would mandate fair trade practices that prevent the exploitation of weaker economies, and it would guarantee economic rights—food, water, education, healthcare—as inalienable entitlements for every human being, not as charities doled out at the discretion of the wealthy. A rejuvenated international law would also hold all states, regardless of power, accountable to the same standards, ending the hypocrisy that allows some nations to flout norms with impunity while others are punished for far lesser offenses.
The argument for participatory governance is not merely moral but strategic. States that involve all their citizens in a meaningful way in the governance of their country are less likely to engage in external conflict because their leaders are accountable to electorates who bear the costs of war. But this participation must be substantive, not procedural. Holding elections means little if economic inequality allows elites to dominate policy, if media concentration distorts public discourse, or if voter suppression silences marginalized groups. True participation requires deliberative assemblies, workplace unionization, digital direct democracy, and local autonomy. When people feel ownership over their government, they are less susceptible to the siren song of populist demagogues and the xenophobic chants of nationalists.
The post-2008 austerity consensus has been a disaster for global stability. Neoliberalism’s core assumption—that unregulated competition drives progress—ignores the fact that markets produce winners and losers, and that losers, when abandoned, turn to extremism. The rise of far-right parties, the spread of extremist movements, and the surge in gang violence are all, in no insignificant part, responses to economic despair.
A global fair deal must prioritize universal basic services as human rights, not commodities. It must invest in green industrial policy to create high-wage, low-carbon jobs. It must cancel the crushing debts of the Global South and replace free trade with fair trade, ensuring that corporations cannot exploit weak regulations in developing States. And it must tax extreme wealth to fund the end of extreme poverty. These are not socialist or communist ideas; they are merely common sense policies.
Yet NATO’s current trajectory assumes that security is a zero-sum game, where one state’s gain is another’s loss. This ignores that the greatest threats of our time—climate change, pandemics, nuclear proliferation—respect no borders. Even China and the United States, despite their rivalry, have cooperated on climate accords and pandemic response when it served their interests. The Montreal Protocol succeeded because states realized ozone depletion threatened them all. Collective security, properly structured, can work. The question is not whether cooperation is possible, but whether we have the will to pursue it. NATO does not answer this challenge, but seeks to exploit it by setting people against each other in the name of militarization.
We have a choice. We can continue down the path of militarized security, where trillions are spent on weapons that guarantee mutual destruction, where inequality festers, and where the logic of competition ensures that no one is ever truly safe. Or we can invest in a future where no child goes hungry, no family lacks healthcare, and no nation lives in fear of another—a future where international law serves as an equalizer, ensuring that the rights and dignity of all people are upheld, and that our shared planet is preserved for generations to come. The former is the path of barbarism. The latter is the path of civilization.
NATO’s leaders would do well to remember that true security is not measured in the size of an arsenal, but in the strength of the societies it claims to protect—and that those societies are far weaker when their most vulnerable members are abandoned to the consequences of unchecked militarism.
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What I Saw When I Stopped Pretending
I invite you to sit with me in this feeling of brokenness, and to step outside of the American delusion of war making and "peace through strength"—the normalization of coercion and dominance.
Jul 08, 2026
Some of the most peaceful moments of my life were spent standing on the deck of a US Navy aircraft carrier just before dawn. It feels like looking over the entire ocean, into endless blue water. An aircraft carrier is massive—like a floating city on the sea—and yet you can still feel the gentle rocking from the ocean's waves through the soles of your feet. When you breathe into this moment—the salty air filling your lungs—you're reminded of how incredibly small you are in the grand scheme of things. The realization causes a sort of lightness and fluttering within the chest, an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all that you cannot understand.
Then the day begins. The launch of the first F/A-18 fighter jet tears a sonic hole through the silent morning. Naval airmen run around the deck, bracing themselves and clutching their headsets to evade the thundering sound. The whole ship shakes as it launches jet after jet, white and gray trails marking their courses across the serene blue sky. Fuel and oil cover the hands and faces of mechanics working throughout the day and into the night to make sure the jets keep coming and going, launch after launch. There is not enough ocean breeze to prevent the sweat that stains our coveralls. The mixture of stenches—salt, oil, sweat—sticks to the hair inside your nostrils. It is the same the next day and the next. Preparation for war—for terror—is a never-ending, completely mundane affair. We eat our oatmeal, we don our coveralls, we load the jets, we drop the bombs, we do it all again.
I currently work for the antiwar organization CODEPINK, but long before that, I was an enlisted member of the US Navy. My last job in the Navy was easy compared with others. I was the operations specialist for a squadron of fighter pilots. I worked with the commissioned officers, pilots whom I affectionately called "the frat boys of the Navy." They were young, zealous, mostly white men hyped about their jobs. I mean, they got to fly ultrafast planes and practice dropping bombs all day. Isn't this the American boy's dream? I sat in their lounge every day, making sure everything was documented and accounted for to get them launching and landing their jets with enough fuel, with the right parachutes, and at the right times.
I joined the military for the same reasons many young people do. My parents couldn't afford to send me to college. I was desperate to get out of the house, stuck in a place whose only immediate opportunities were casinos and hospitality work, and burdened with a brain and heart that were very eager to prove something. Along came Polly—or, in my case, a Navy recruiter. Travel? Free college? Free basic housing? A mission bigger than myself?! I thought about it for half a second before I signed up.
When I told the pilots about my studies and my evolving love of the sea, they laughed, saying, "Well, don't pay attention to how much fuel we dump in the ocean."
American war making is in the mundane. I'll say it again and again. Most of us are mere assembly workers in a war-making factory, so disconnected are we in this 21st-century age of war. Most of us are kept far away from the bloody realities of our jobs. At the end of the day, my job was to push paper. I saw a copy machine more than I did a gun. I don't have valiant stories of combating ISIS. I never leapt onto a grenade to save my comrades. And yet, my spirit and conscience would not let me get away with this blissful ignorance, this American-made delusion, for long.
My saving grace—and the start of my awakening—was the fact that I was a loner. I had a unique job; no one else did what I did. I was kept away from my peers and didn't care to belong. On the weekends, when many Naval airmen would go out partying, drinking, and building all that collective trauma and camaraderie together, I'd drive four hours from the coast of Virginia to its forest interior. I was always looking for a good hike, a mountain to climb, a waterfall to swim in. In my solitude, I felt an ancestral sense of connection to the land and stars. I could feel love in the light glow of the sun that somehow still reached me between the dense forest trees. Swimming at the base of a waterfall felt like a gentle cleansing—a return to the womb of the Earth herself. There was an innate sense of safety that would wash over me as I lay under the night sky, waiting for asteroids to streak across the stars and rain down on me.
I fell deeply in love. I started going to school while still on active duty. I decided to study Environmental Science. When I told the pilots about my studies and my evolving love of the sea, they laughed, saying, "Well, don't pay attention to how much fuel we dump in the ocean."
That statement stayed with me. It followed me onto that deck of the aircraft carrier, lingering with me on those quiet mornings when I looked over the sea. What kind of world was I actually building? What kind of destruction could I possibly be contributing to?
They say that if you're lucky, you can see dolphins swimming, leaping in the waves close to the ships. I was never blessed with such a sight. But I began to think about that fuel, clogging their blowholes, poisoning their lungs. I began to think about the places where we dropped boots and bullets and bombs. I thought of the people whom I deemed enemies and yet knew nothing about. Do they not deserve to enjoy the refreshing peace of a waterfall too? Do their lungs know the crisp, clean air of a mountain walk, away from bullets and the exhaust of aircraft engines? Something broke within me then—something irreparable. And I could no longer pretend to belong.
I don't think I am the only person feeling this way. And those who do, I invite you to sit with me in this feeling of brokenness, and to step outside of the American delusion of war making and "peace through strength"—the normalization of coercion and dominance. This is an invitation to see what you see, to let it wash over your conscience and compel you to change course. Yes, it is frightening to grapple with the truth, but to ignore it guarantees our collective death, both in spirit and in the material world.
I have seen nothing that so succinctly explains and connects the US military's active demolition of people with the destruction of the environment until I watched Abby Martin’s 2025 documentary film, Earth's Greatest Enemy. It offers thorough, undeniable evidence that our country’s ongoing military campaigns and occupations are destroying entire communities and ecosystems. To me, this film encapsulates both a sense of grief and of hope: grief over the horror that US militarism has inflicted upon us and the planet, and hope, embodied in the people who continue defending their homelands, waterways, and communities against the seemingly insurmountable force that is the US military. Earth’s Greatest Enemy is available now on major streaming platforms. I invite you to watch the film, to invite friends to watch the film, and then tell me what you saw, tell me what you felt.
In every person, there is a soldier or warrior spirit, long waiting for a direction worth fighting for. This Earth is a place worth protecting, and in its people is a common humanity worth putting your body on the line for.
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The US Navy’s 'Killer' Submarine Is Participating in RIMPAC 2026
One of the five submarines in 2026 RIMPAC is the US Navy’s USS Charlotte, which torpedoed and sunk the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in international waters five days after the US-Israel war on Iran began.
Jul 07, 2026
As the Trump administration and the US Congress continues to ramp up rhetoric of “China is our enemy,” 2026 is the 30th year that the United States has organized the largest naval war practice in the world, called Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC. For 37 days from June 24 through July 31, the RIMPAC war “games” will be held in the waters off the state of Hawaii.
This year 31 countries have sent naval, air, and land military forces to Hawaii for RIMPAC.
50% of the Participating Countries are Members or “Partners” of NATO, the NORTH ATLANTIC Treaty Organization
Interestingly, 50% of the participating countries are members or “partners” of NATO, the NORTH ATLANTIC Treaty Organization. Eight of the 10 NATO countries are from Europe: Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Canada is the only other NATO member from the Western Hemisphere, along with, of course, the host country, the United States.
Five of the 6 NATO “partners” have Pacific Ocean coasts: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Colombia.
Israel Is Participating and Weaving Itself Into the Fabric and Organization of the US Military
Invited from its wars in the Middle East, Israel, the US partner in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the destruction of southern Lebanon, and the war on Iran, will also have a presence in RIMPAC as it continues to weave itself into the fabric of the US military.
Although RIMPAC has not specified what the role of the Israeli military delegation is, one can surmise that its members will act as liaison officers, planners, observers, or staff officers participating in command-and-control and multinational planning activities and giving lessons learned in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
40 Ships, 200 Aircraft, 25,000 Personnel, and 5 Submarines
40 military ships, including 13 from the US, 200 aircraft, 25,000 military personnel, and five Submarines will practice their violent mission of war in this year’s RIMPAC, which will include live fire and bombings on the Pohakuloa range on the Big Island of Hawaii, sinking a large retired US navy ship off the island of Kauai and amphibious landings on the turtle hatching beach of Bellows on the island of Oahu.
Harm to marine mammals created by the large numbers of ships continues to be a major concern. The numbers of “takes” or deaths of marine mammals allowed by the US government permits are horrendous.
US Navy at Pearl Harbor Involved in the US-Israeli War on Iran
On February 28, 2026, the Trump administration allowed itself to get suckered into joining Israel in attacking Iran. The massive bombings and missile attacks from the US and Israel assassinated the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and many other senior Iranian officials on the first day of the war on Iran.
Also killed on February 28, 2026, the first day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, were 156 civilians, including 120 school children when a US missile destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebe Elementary School school in Minab, southern Iran.
USS Charlotte, the US Navy Submarine in RIMPAC, That Sunk an Iranian Ship 2,000 Miles from Iran
One of the five submarines in 2026 RIMPAC is the US Navy’s USS Charlotte.
On March 4, 2026, five days after the US-Israel war on Iran began, the USS Charlotte torpedoed and sunk the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in international waters 19 nautical miles off the southern tip of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean.
The USS Charlotte torpedoing of the Dena killed 104 Iranian sailors. At the time of the attack, Dena had a crew of 136 personnel and only 32 survived. According to reports, the remains of 20 of the deceased were not recovered.
It is the only instance since World War II in which a United States Navy submarine sank a surface vessel using torpedoes.
The Iranian ship was 2,300 miles from Iran having participated in the multilateral naval exercise MILAN 2026, in February 2026, and in the International Fleet Review 2026, held at the Indian port of Visakhaptnam.
The US sent US Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Steve Koehler, the highest-ranking naval officer in the Pacific Command, to the International Fleet Review. Ironically, a US Navy release revealed that a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft took part and conducted anti-submarine warfare drills with other participating forces in MILAN 2026.
The United States Navy was to have sent the Arleigh Burke Class guided-missile destroyer USS Pinckney (DDG-91), but participation was cancelled at the last minute for “undisclosed operational reasons.”
According to an article in The Maritime Executive written before the US-Israeli war on Iran started, the Indian military was probably not concerned about the lack of US participation, “as the It would have been embarrassing for the Indian hosts to have had Pinckney moored alongside IRINS Dena, should war have broken out with Iran during the period of the fleet review.”
After the USS Charlotte sunk the Dena, India allowed Iranian warship IRIS Lavan to dock at the port of Kochi on March, 4 2026 with its 183-member crew housed at naval facilities. Sri Lanka allowed another Iranian warship IRIS Bushehr, to dock at Trincomalee port and housed its 208-member crew at the naval camp on March 5, 2026.
India's former chief of naval staff, Admiral Arun Prakah, commented: "It’s a bit of treachery of the US to attend a peaceful function side-by-side with Iranian navy, where there’s a lot of camaraderie, and then the moment the Iranian ship pops out of harbour, it’s sunk... They could have delayed this action to spare India this embarrassment."
That comment, and India allowing one Iranian ship to seek safe harbor in an Indian port after the USS Charlotte torpedoed the IRIS Dena, is probably the reason why the massive US military unified command “Indo-Pacific Command,” and host of RIMPAC, recently dropped “Indo” from its name and is now called the “Pacific Command,” even though its area of responsibility still includes the Indian subcontinent.
The US Central command said that the US has now sunk and destroyed 60 Iranian naval vessels.
Another Tragedy Involving Another US Submarine Homeported at Pearl Harbor
However, those of us who live in Hawaii and those from Japan remember another tragic incident with a US submarine homeported in Pearl Harbor.
On February 9, 2001, the US Navy’s USS Greenville conducted an “emergency” surfacing with 16 VIP civilians onboard as a part of the US Navy's Distinguished Visitor Embarkation (DVE) program. The USS Greeneville came up under the Japanese student training vessel Ehime Maru, 9 nautical miles off the island of Oahu, breaking the hull of the ship which quickly sank. Thirty-five people were aboard the Ehime Maru, of which 26 were rescued, one with serious injuries. Nine were killed, four high school students, two teachers, and three crew members, with US Navy and Japanese divers retrieving 8 of the 9 bodies from the sunken vessel which was raised from the ocean floor during October 2001.
Thankfully, the USS Greeneville is not participating in RIMPAC 2026 and is now homeported in San Diego.
Citizens Protest RIMPAC
Each edition of RIMPAC is protested by citizens in Hawaii. On June 24 a spirited ceremony and procession preceded the protest at the gates of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Numerous persons will be at the gates of Pearl Harbor over the next weeks to continue the challenge to the war practice called RIMPAC.
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A Military Flyover Country Turns 250
As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and "freedom," also serve another grim reminder.
Jul 06, 2026
As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250 “Celebrations" over the holiday weekend, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with multiple levels of security checkpoints, and the sky full of military flyovers, including a seven-hour schedule of flyovers on July 4th.
Military flyovers come at a devastating cost—economically, psychologically, and environmentally. The most recent ones came in the middle of a heatwave where even Trump’s American State Fair closed after people were baptizing themselves in the religious tent to prevent heat stroke. But flyovers are not new and have been used as a propaganda tool for military recruitment during NFL games and summer festivals. The militarization has been so normalized for so long.
This past weekend, thousands of people cheered on the flyovers, but many did not. The sounds of war shook windows, terrified children, animals, and those suffering from PTSD. Washington DC is made up of 700,000 people without statehood, leaving it little power to push back at the military occupation of the city, let alone the military playground.
In passing, I overheard folks sneering “Here’s where all our money goes,” and another asking “Is this what Iran sounds like right now?” These flyovers, an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a “show”. The bombs did not drop on the occupied city of Washington, D.C., as they do from some of the same jets that fly over places like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran. My children know they can cover their ears, cuddle in close to me, and wait it out. The planes will pass, the ground will stop trembling, and we can return to their bedtime routines. But for children just like them in my home country of Iran, for their families, for our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Lebanon, and so many other places devastated by Western imperialism, those same sounds mean something entirely different. They mean bombs falling on schools, neighborhoods erased in seconds, families torn apart before they can say goodbye. They also cuddle in close to their loved ones, but they do so knowing it may be the last time.
As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and "freedom," also serve another grim reminder. We, in the diaspora, are forced to fund our own oppression twice over: first with the bombs dropping on our families abroad, then with that same taxpayer money reverberating back to our doorsteps here. Hovering over our neighborhoods and our children's heads, and terrorizing our communities instead of feeding, healing, and sustaining them. We must not allow ourselves to grow desensitized to the reality of what our tax dollars could be funding instead of the spread of surveillance, destruction, and devastation. And we must make it clear that we will never mistake the roar of engines overhead for the promise of peace, whether that is abroad or here.
Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.
The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?
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We Need a Department of Peace, Not $1.5 Trillion for More War
Holding peace as an organizing principle? Developing policies that promote peaceful resolution of conflict? Can you imagine this at the core to the American government? With significant funding?
May 14, 2026
It’s hard to avoid noticing, and internally screaming over, the Trump administration’s proposed military budget upgrade to $1.5 trillion annually—as though the present trillion-dollar annual gift to the end of the world weren’t enough.
It’s not just the proposed taxpayer bleed. It’s the collective assumption that “self-defense” requires an ever-present readiness to kill lots of people—and beyond that the utter certainty that we have soulless enemies out there who want what we have, hate our freedoms, and will take what they can the moment we relax. This is just the way it is. No questions allowed.
And our enemies aren’t pussycats. One of them, for instance, is China. Indeed, as Megan Russell of CODEPINK writes:
US lawmakers have been using China as a military budget increaser and ultimate policy-generator for years. Competition with Beijing is invoked to justify military expansion, new regional alliances, AI weapons development, semiconductor restrictions, and rising nuclear expenditures. In Washington, framing a policy as necessary to "counter China" has become one of the quickest ways to secure bipartisan support. As a result, the "China threat" rhetoric proliferates while the military budget skyrockets.
“A quick way to secure bipartisan support”—that says it all. Nothing holds a country together like a good enemy. This is who we are; this is the identity we’re stuck with. We unify when we fight. Apparently that’s at our political core, which is why any cries for peace—which is oh, so complex—are ignored, belittled, and virtually always voted down. All of which is to our own detriment, not to mention the world’s detriment.
As Russell notes:
...currently, the US and China are building their own tech ecosystems, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The US refers to this as a "strategic rivalry" with wider national security implications. This perspective only exists because China is considered a rival. China does not have to be considered a rival. China could just as easily be considered a development partner. And indeed it should, because cooperation on tech is the only potential avenue for ensuring the continued existence of the planet.
Uh, too bad, Planet Earth. Collective humanity refuses to think at that level. Technology serves only our belief in dominance. Consider President Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” nuclear defense system: thousands of satellites patrolling the planet, on the lookout for enemy nuclear missiles, a deeply flawed reincarnation of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative plan that went nowhere. The cost, though minimized by the Trump administration, could wind up, according to some estimates, amounting to well over $3 trillion.
And, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense:
Pursuing Golden Dome also poses serious strategic risks, including the potential to accelerate nuclear arms and space arms races and to undermine opportunities to secure verifiable arms control agreements that reduce the nuclear threat. The program has also raised troubling conflict-of-interest concerns involving individuals within the Trump administration and companies vying for Golden Dome contracts.
Wars. Sometimes you stop ’em, sometimes you start ’em, but they ain’t going away. The most powerful people on the planet are utterly committed to the limited nature of their thinking. That’s just how it goes. What about that do you not understand, Rep. Kucinich?
Remember US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and his Department of Peace legislation, which he introduced in Congress every year from 2001 to 2011? And it was introduced again in 2013 by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). It, uh, never passed.
Here’s how it was defined in 2001, as HR2458:
Establishes a Department of Peace, which shall be headed by a Secretary of Peace appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Sets forth the mission of the Department, including to: (1) hold peace as an organizing principle; (2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and (3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.
Establishes in the Department the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Peace, which shall provide assistance and make recommendations to the Secretary and the President concerning intergovernmental policies relating to peace and nonviolent conflict resolution.
Holding peace as an organizing principle? Developing policies that promote peaceful resolution of conflict? Can you imagine this at the core to the American government? With significant funding? As I read these words today, I feel compelled to help keep them alive. I want that level of sanity in my government—that level of commitment to something I believe in, with all my heart.
Instead:
Taken together, the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions point to a clear conclusion about its recent request for a whopping $1.5 trillion in military spending: This is not a defense budget. It is a war budget, designed to enable a pattern of aggressive military action and escalating threats that are already imposing a devastating toll on civilians abroad, while the combination of spending cuts and rising costs imposed on Americans is deepening injustice at home.
This is Scott Paul, writing at The Hill. He goes on: “This budget is certainly not business as usual. It is a dramatic reordering of national priorities. Trump has made this shift explicit, arguing that the US cannot afford childcare, Medicaid or Medicare because, as he put it, ‘we’re fighting wars.’”
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Humanity's Journey to Peace: From a Chicago Lunchroom to the World Stage
When we listen to and empathize with our “enemy,” we can start seeing beyond the moment and working to create a world that works for everyone. We can only evolve together.
May 10, 2026
Yes, I’m still trying to write a book. Meanwhile, horrific wars rage and the outrage I feel quietly morphs into helplessness and then, after a while, shame. I believe, in some deep place inside me, that we can move beyond this. I know we can.
I also believe I have a role to play, as a writer, to help push our collective awareness beyond a public shrug over the cost and consequences of militarism: our trillion-dollar-plus military budget and ho-hum acceptance of the “collateral damage” that budget inevitably winds up creating... over there somewhere. This is simply assumed to be the nature of power. You know, dominance. It’s how we stay safe.
What I want to cry out is that this is fake power. It’s a trap. It keeps us in hell. Connection and creative conflict resolution are a different form of power. When we listen to and empathize with our “enemy,” we can start seeing beyond the moment and working to create a world that works for everyone. We can only evolve together.
I say these words humbly, quietly. In no way am I suggesting that anything about such a process is simple. But it can only begin if we believe it’s possible, and then find the collective courage to begin the journey... together.
When emotions are uncontrolled—when they are uncontrolled and armed—the fragmentary nonsense has lethal potential.
So I open up the soul of my book and tell a story: a story about Restorative Justice, which I have written about a great deal. People sit together in what is called a peace circle, sometimes to discuss a harm that has been done, a wrong that has occurred. All sides in the matter are part of the circle; they sit in vibrant equality. A talking piece is passed around. When you hold it, you speak; otherwise, you listen. Often the words go deep. People tell difficult truths.
The following story is that of Robert Spicer, who at the time was the culture and climate coordinator at Chicago’s Fenger High School. To put it more simply, he was the peace guy. He had a peace room. He trained students in conflict resolution. He brought Restorative Justice to Fenger.
One day, as students were eating breakfast in the cafeteria, waiting for the first bell to ring, two boys were standing together and suddenly ignited the volatility in the room—the volatility present at every struggling school in a low-income neighborhood. They tried out a new handshake.
Amid the talk and laughter, Spicer explained: “Another student noticed them doing their handshake and began to question them about what they were doing. Feeling disrespected, the students started to have words and then other students gathered around to see what was going on.”
And suddenly, the first two boys, he explained, “postured themselves to fight.”
But Fenger was a high school that knew about something beyond fighting—beyond the unleashing of righteous anger, the subduing of an enemy. Fenger, like other schools that have opened their doors to Restorative Justice, had peace ambassadors roaming their hallways. These are young people trained in restorative practices, like listening, like keeping calm, like refusing to surrender to the inevitability of hatred. Sometimes they were called peer jurors: students who help run conflict-resolution circles, circles that address disputes and attempt to undo—that is, heal—harm that has been done.
And there were peace ambassadors in the cafeteria that morning.
“As I was preparing for my day, some of my peer jurors who were in the lunch room approached me and told me about the situation and who was involved. One of my peer jurors said, ‘You’re going to have a big peace circle today. Let me know if you need my help.’ Quite frankly, because this situation happened in the lunchroom, I knew that all of the eight male students involved were not going to end up in my office but be sent home on a suspension. But was I in for a surprise that day!”
Both the dean and the principal had interviewed the boys and, oh changing world, decided they needed to sit in a peace circle with one another. The Chicago Public School System, like most American school systems, is primarily ensconced in punishment-based discipline, but this is changing.
Eight boys, along with the dean and the principal, entered the Spicer peace room and sat with one another. They passed the talking piece around the circle. As each one talked, an awareness filled the room: This was a big misunderstanding, nothing more. Some of the boys talked about other issues they were dealing with, complicating their day and their behavior. People got it.
“After the closing ceremony,” Spicer wrote, “each of the students shook hands and even hugged each other as they were preparing to leave my office. They did this without any adults prompting them to do this, which showed their sincerity. Once we concluded the circle, the adults decided to allow them to blow off some steam and play basketball. And the students who were the main ones in conflict were on the same team. They played for about 25 minutes and afterwards were sent to class skipping and excited about the school day.”
And so it begins. Kids talk, a community that hadn’t existed—a sense of commonality and understanding among a group of tough guys at a Chicago high school—emerges. Punishment morphs into basketball, into joy, into healing. This is not a simple process, but—cynics, beware—it’s possible; it happens, in schools and elsewhere. An awareness is slowly shifting.
Sometimes it’s a matter of life or death. When emotions are uncontrolled—when they are uncontrolled and armed—the fragmentary nonsense has lethal potential. This is the case in so many broken communities, around the country, across the planet.
How can we transcend war? For those planning for peace, Restorative Justice is a gold nugget.
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Canada Is Quietly Putting War Into Your Portfolio
By hosting the proposed Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank, Canada risks transforming war from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product.
May 07, 2026
Canada is set to host the headquarters of the proposed Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, a new multinational institution designed to mobilize tens of billions in financing for military and security projects among allied nations. In short, what we are seeing is the quiet normalization of something far more consequential: the permanent financialization of war.
The structure being envisioned for DSRB closely resembles other multilateral financial institutions. It would raise capital on global markets, issue bonds, and extend loans to governments and defense companies. That means funding for military supply chains, weapons systems, and defense infrastructure would increasingly flow through financial markets rather than direct public expenditure. In doing so, war itself risks being transformed from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product embedded in portfolios.
And so, with remarkable efficiency, we may be arriving at a point where, whether you like it or not, you are investing in war. Not because you consciously chose to, but because modern finance rarely asks for permission. It integrates. It diffuses. It embeds. Just as complex mortgage-backed securities seeped into pension funds and retirement portfolios before the 2008 Financial Crisis, instruments tied to defense financing could quietly become part of the same financial plumbing that underpins everyday savings. Deposits in major banks, such as Royal Bank of Canada or Toronto-Dominion Bank, feed into broader lending and investment pools. If those banks help underwrite DSRB bonds or finance defense projects, then ordinary savings are, at least indirectly, part of the system. You won’t need to opt in. The system will do it for you.
Once you are in that system, try opting out. Go ahead—divest. In theory, it sounds simple. In practice, it is anything but. Large pension funds, such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board or the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, operate within a web of financial relationships that makes complete divestment extraordinarily complex. If DSRB bonds are rated as safe investment-grade assets, they could easily find their way into fixed-income portfolios. Even if funds choose to avoid them directly, indirect exposure remains: through banks that underwrite the bonds, through ETFs that bundle defense assets, and through lending syndicates that finance defense contractors. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men” of global finance, institutions like JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, are already lining up behind this model. When the entire financial stack aligns like this, divestment becomes less a matter of choice and more a question of how far you are willing, or even able, to disentangle yourself from the system.
The DSRB starts to look like a "World Bank for Warfare."
What emerges is not just a new bank, but a new layer of abstraction between citizens and the consequences of war. Traditionally, military spending is debated, however imperfectly, through parliaments and public scrutiny. A financialized model shifts that process into capital markets, where decisions are driven less by voters and more by risk assessments, yield expectations, and institutional incentives. Over time, this risks normalizing war as an investable asset class, something to be priced, traded, and held in portfolios rather than questioned in public forums.
That transformation carries consequences. One of the most immediate concerns is that such a bank could normalize or even facilitate controversial military interventions. If borrowing costs for defense spending are lowered, the financial barriers to launching military operations also fall. History offers a sobering precedent. The Iraq War was widely condemned after the central justification, claims of weapons of mass destruction, collapsed under scrutiny. Yet the war had already been financed, executed, and justified through institutional momentum. A system like DSRB could make such momentum easier to sustain, not harder. When capital is readily available, restraint becomes less likely.
Over time, this could make war financing a permanent feature of the global system. What used to be occasional becomes routine, and what was once debated becomes taken for granted. In that sense, the DSRB starts to look like a "World Bank for Warfare."
Equally concerning is the question of democratic oversight. Traditional military spending must pass through national parliaments, where budgets are debated by elected representatives. A multilateral financial institution operates differently. By raising funds on global capital markets and deploying them through loans and financial instruments, DSRB could create a layer of decision-making that sits at arm’s length from voters. The result is a subtle but significant shift from public accountability to financial abstraction. Decisions about long-term military financing could become less visible, less contested, and ultimately less democratic.
What makes this shift particularly jarring is where it is happening. Canada has long cultivated an image of a country that prioritizes diplomacy, multilateralism, and peacekeeping. Yet by stepping forward to host the DSRB, it is positioning itself not just as a participant in global security, but as a financial hub for its expansion. The very country that has emphasized de-escalation is now spearheading an ecosystem designed to sustain long-term militarization.
In a world where defense financing is deeply embedded in financial markets, peace does not simply reduce risk; it disrupts revenue.
The implications extend beyond symbolism. By helping institutionalize a system capable of mobilizing upwards of $100-135 billion in defense financing, Canada is effectively tying part of its economic future to the expansion of military spending. That alignment carries risks. When financial systems are built around a particular sector, they begin to depend on its growth. We have seen this dynamic before, most notably in the housing market prior to the 2008 Financial Crisis, when an entire economic ecosystem became reliant on ever-expanding real estate values.
Apply that same logic to the realm of defense, and the parallels become difficult to ignore. A system that depends on continuous military spending creates subtle but powerful incentives: to maintain high levels of defense budgets, to expand procurement programs, and to sustain the geopolitical tensions that justify both. Over time, what begins as risk management can evolve into dependence. A system built to finance war risks becoming a system that depends on it.
Then comes the uncomfortable question: What happens if the wars actually stop?
In a world where defense financing is deeply embedded in financial markets, peace does not simply reduce risk; it disrupts revenue. If the assumptions underpinning defense-linked investments are built on sustained spending and ongoing tension, then de-escalation could trigger a recalibration across portfolios, institutions, and markets. The consequences would not remain confined to defense companies or financiers. They would ripple outward to pension funds, public investment vehicles, and the everyday savings of millions who never consciously chose to participate in this system.
This is where the analogy to the 2008 Financial Crisis becomes more than rhetorical. Before that collapse, housing was treated as a permanently expanding asset class. Financial innovation spread exposure across the system, embedding risk in places few fully understood. When the underlying assumptions failed, the fallout was systemic. Homes were lost. Savings evaporated. Institutions faltered.
Now imagine a similar architecture built around militarization. A world in which conflict is not just a geopolitical reality, but a financial dependency. Where instability is quietly priced into the system as a driver of returns. And where, if that instability recedes, the economic consequences are felt far beyond the battlefield.
At that point, the challenge will not just be moral or political, it will be structural. Governments may find themselves trying to stabilize a system that has grown dependent on the very thing it claims to minimize: war. And there may come a moment when the system simply breaks, and it becomes impossible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
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