Militarisation Is KILLING The Collective West From Within | Dr. J. Oberg and Prof. D. Gibbs

## The politics of armament vs. social welfare: a central tension What emerges from the conversation is a stark diagnosis: the West is increasingly investing in militarisation at the direct expense of social welfare, and this pattern is neither accidental nor inevitable. The exchange makes the case that after the Cold War a unique opening existed for demilitarization and a reorientation of public resources toward health, education and environmental protection. Instead, elites across states — not only defense contractors, but bureaucracies, academic networks and political coalitions — redirected that opportunity toward perpetuating military spending. The result is a prolonged trade-off in which “guns” consistently out-compete “butter,” and citizens pay the price in deteriorating social provision and democratic oversight. This framing pushes beyond moralizing about budgets. The conversation treats militarisation as a political economy: a self-reproducing system with constituencies, narratives and institutional momentum. That system converts the state’s fiscal capacity into geopolitical posture and private profit, and then uses fear, historical mythmaking and diplomatic isolation to justify its expansion. The exchange insists this is not merely a matter of occasional overspending but a structural realignment of priorities with long-term consequences for democratic legitimacy and social stability. ## The missed post–Cold War opportunity A recurring theme in the discussion is the lost chance at the end of the Cold War to create a less militarized international order. The conversation presents this as a genuine historical crossroads: the collapse of bipolar confrontation could have led to major reductions in military expenditure, broad arms control, and a reorientation of resources toward rebuilding societies and addressing transnational problems. Instead, the narrative advanced by the exchange is one of strategic choice — where Western policymakers, for differing reasons, elected not to dismantle military architectures but to adapt and expand them. The reasons offered are practical and political. Institutions whose raison d’être was competition with a now-defunct adversary sought new mandates, and influential actors exploited the ambiguity to maintain status and budgets. Diplomacy that might have anchored cooperative security arrangements gave way to policies of dominance and enlargement. This section of the conversation contends that those choices were consequential: NATO enlargement, the perpetuation of military-industrial networks, and a failure to prioritize common security meant the “peace dividend” largely failed to materialize for ordinary people. ## Manufacturing consent: narratives, fear and political economy Why did societies accept — or fail to resist — this outcome? The exchange turns to mechanisms of consent. The conversation argues that elites and institutions manufacture public support through threat inflation, personalization of enemies, and the steady dramatization of existential risks. Fear becomes the primary currency: domestic audiences are told their welfare depends on militarized responses to vague or exaggerated threats. The discussion highlights a layered ecosystem that sustains this dynamic. Think tanks, media framing, political leadership, and vested economic interests cohere to produce a steady drumbeat about danger and urgency. Academic and bureaucratic networks with Cold War ties morph into new rationales for continued funding. Simultaneously, the personalization of adversaries makes diplomacy more difficult; the enemy becomes an individual or an ideological caricature rather than a set of negotiable policies. That intensifies incentives for confrontation and dampens the political space for demilitarized alternatives. A critical point here is that militarised spending is defended not only as necessary for security but also as a form of economic stimulus. The “defense jobs” argument is repeatedly invoked to legitimize procurement and basing decisions. The participants in the conversation push back on that premise: public spending on social infrastructure typically yields better job creation, social resilience, and long-term economic returns than expensive weapons systems do. Yet the politically potent coalition behind defense spending keeps the budget biases in place. ## NATO enlargement, hubris, and the security dilemma revisited The exchange addresses a specific and contentious mechanism of remilitarization: alliance expansion. The conversation posits that widening military blocs into the neighbors of a weakened great power had predictable geopolitical consequences. Instead of integrating the post–Cold War order through shared institutions or pan-European security architectures, enlargement is portrayed as a policy choice that produced resentment, strategic insecurity, and ultimately confrontation. The discussion argues that diplomatic assurances and informal understandings were sidelined or broken, eroding trust and closing off options for cooperative security. This view reframes the security dilemma: it is not merely a natural dynamic of mutual fear, but often an outcome of deliberate policy choices that neglect the security interests of the other side. The exchange claims that such choices generate backlash, produce spheres of resistance or rivalry, and then supply the very pretexts used to justify further militarization. Rather than breaking cycles of insecurity, expansionary policies can create them — a boomerang effect in which past interventions yield new threats, which are then used to justify more interventions. ## The normalization of extremism and the erosion of diplomacy Another striking thread of the conversation is how diplomacy and routine channels of engagement have been deprioritized. The discussants argue that in recent years, high-level diplomatic contact between rival powers has been reduced to a minimum, and that the climate of demonization has replaced sustained negotiation. What would have previously been routine summitry or crisis management is now exceptional or impossible because the political environment has vilified interlocutors and made compromise politically costly. This hardening of stance has domestic ramifications: it narrows the deliberative space in democratic societies, encourages rhetorical excess, and empowers hawkish elements across administrations. The conversation notes the historical contrast with earlier periods where leaders, even in competitive eras, sustained institutionalized lines of communication. The present environment is characterized instead by brinkmanship, personal vilification, and a rhetorical escalation that normalizes extraordinary policy choices and downplays the catastrophic risks inherent in them. ## The domestic consequences: welfare retrenchment and democratic strain If militarisation is a policy choice, who pays the bill? The exchange repeatedly returns to this question with urgency. The central claim is that increased defense budgets are financed through foregone social spending or by fiscal compression: public money that could address healthcare, housing, education and climate adaptation is redirected into armaments. The cumulative effect is social strain: rising inequality, weakened public services, and reduced resilience to non-military threats. Beyond concrete budgetary trade-offs, the conversation stresses undermined democratic legitimacy. Citizens are asked to accept policies framed as emergency measures, often without transparent debate. The manufacturing of consent and the personalization of foreign policy reduce accountability. In some portrayals, the state begins to look more like a security manager for elite interests than a redistributor of public welfare. This long-term erosion of trust — between governed and government — is presented as one of the most corrosive costs of sustained militarisation. ## Toward alternatives: recla

Militarisation Is KILLING The Collective West From Within | Dr. Oberg and Prof. Gibbs Ursula von der Leyen just announced a lovely-sounding policy under which the block would "ReArm" and make 100s of billions of Euro's available for member states to militarise to their teeth. With no plan on why this is necessary or how it should be achieved, numerical spending goals on militarisation is another absolut fully that will end in a complete meltdown if it is not stopped in time. But the chances for that are slim, as Europe constantly learns the wrong lessons from its own history. But that begs the question: Why is there always money for military spending and never for social well-being? How are the warmongers constantly disenfranchising their own populations for the benefit of the Euro-Atlantic Military Industrial Complex? To discuss this, I’m talking today to two fantastic colleagues who have both been on this channel before but not together yet. I’ve got with me Dr. Jan Oberg from Sweden and Professor David Gibbs from Arizona State University in the USA. While Jan Oberg has been working a life-time on peace research and is an outspoken critic of militarism, Dr. Gibbs, who’s a historian, is now working on a new project he calls “Guns, Butter, and the Politics of Permanent War”. I thought the two are probably great conversation partners so here we are to discuss this topic: How there always seems to be money for war, but not for social spending. A very topical issue considering that the EU just announced more funding for weapons, presumably by cutting back on social spending. #M3 The fact is that there's no one on earth who wants to get at the throat of Europe or America. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—the usual enemies—are not capable of and not interested in fighting or replacing the U.S. or smashing up New York or something like that. The fact is that we're living with what Chalmers Johnson also called the boomerang effect. What comes back now are consequences of what we've done in the past. And, of course, this disastrous policy concerning Ukraine, which should never have happened, also because the Ukrainian people did not want NATO membership. There's no indication of that before or after the invasion. You just do that. You don't listen to anybody. You drive your own hubris policies. You think you can get away with everything? #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies. And today I'm talking to two fantastic colleagues who have both been on this channel before, but not together yet. I've got with me Dr. Jan Oberg from Sweden and Professor David Gibbs from Arizona State University in the USA. While -- 1 of 20 -- Jan Oberg has been working a lifetime on peace research and is an outspoken critic of militarism, Prof. Gibbs, who's a historian, is now working on a new project that he calls "Guns, Butter, and the Politics of Permanent War." I thought the two would probably be great conversation partners, so here we are to discuss this topic: how there always seems to be money for war, but not for social spending. A very topical issue, considering that the EU just announced more funding for weapons, presumably by cutting back on social spending. Jan, David, welcome. #M3 Thank you. #M1 Thank you. #M2 Maybe let me start with you, David. You told me about this very intriguing title that you're working on: "Guns, Butter, and the Politics of Permanent War." What's going through your mind? What needs to be discussed? And what's the "butter" and the "guns" going to be about? #M1 Well, the main thrust of this is that the world, and the United States—I'm an American citizen, so I'll start with my own country, but also the world—had an opportunity at the end of the Cold War for basically a demilitarized world. That was a real option. Gorbachev had proposed the idea of bilateral nuclear disarmament, which very likely would have led to a generalized nuclear disarmament. There were proposals that, with the end of superpower conflict, you'd get genuine empowerment of the U. N. Security Council as the arbiter of international conflicts. You could reasonably expect a great deal of reduced spending on military activity and the reorientation of that to social spending or environmental protection. In the United States, the term we used was the peace dividend. There was a great expectation that with the massive downsizing of the military and what Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex, we would get a peace dividend. It would go back to the public. There were different variations of that. Right-wing libertarians wanted to reduce taxes, give it back to the people, as they like to say, while people more on the left wanted to increase spending on social programs, health care, and the like. But one way or the other, the idea was diverting it away from military spending. I was very struck by the fact, as many people were, that almost immediately after the Cold War was over, a large series of vested interests began looking for a new enemy and looking for a new justification for U.S. power and for further military conflict in the world. -- 2 of 20 -- You know, one might think military conflict is a bad thing. Having enemies is a bad thing. And there was a great deal of enthusiasm in the United States, having won the Cold War so asymmetrically. It was felt that we had won the war, and there was a certain arrogance and hubris associated with that. Again, there was also anxiety about the vested interests that had benefited from the Cold War, which went beyond the military-industrial complex. I mean, I'm an academic, and academia benefited immensely. There was a huge amount of money flowing into academia associated with the Cold War. Many academics worked quietly for the Central Intelligence Agency or the military or something related to that. It was a bit of a gravy train, in fact. And it was going away. And so the idea was, for about a decade, there was an effort to find a new enemy. And eventually, we did find a new enemy. And here we are in a war with one of our new enemies, Russia. So the question for my project was, how did that happen and why did that happen? The reason I focused on the issue of guns versus butter is that the public in the United States, and I suspect in most countries, has always been at least somewhat suspicious of the idea of war. Because I think there's an instinctive understanding among most people that wars are, in the first place, bloody affairs, but also they're expensive affairs. And that inevitably, spending for war will lower their living standards. And that really is true even in times of growth during the '50s and '60s. There's evidence that spending on military equipment is a less efficient way of creating jobs and economic growth than spending on non-military activity. And now you're getting basically a straightforward trade-off in both Europe and the United States between guns and butter. The more we spend on the military, as they're proposing to do in Europe, the less they will have for the European welfare state. The same is true in the United States. And so I think there's always been the suspicion among ordinary people that war is bad for them. And so there's always been a great deal of necessity on the part of elites to manufacture consent, to use Noam Chomsky's phrase or the phrase he popularized. I think it was a journalist—I forget his name—who coined it. But in any case, to manufacture consent, to use fear and threat inflation, as some call it, as a means of generating popular support to overcome the natural reluctance ordinary people have to accepting war and accepting massive spending on war. And so I'm going to do this project on how that happened in the United States. I use archives. I'm a historian, and the archives are now mostly open on this question. And so I'd like to see what elite figures were saying in private, not just in public, about what their interests were, how they saw their interests, how they would manipulate the situation to better advance their interests, what types of threats they would try to develop, and how they would try to develop them, and ultimately how to convince the public to accept these things. So that's the focus of my research project. I see that as something very contemporary because now we're dealing with the long-term effects of those issues as they've played out over decades, including a very real war with Russia, which has threatened repeatedly to go nuclear, as well as a long-term process of remilitarization and expanded military spending, which seems to be in progress right now. -- 3 of 20 -- #M2 This is a fascinating project. And Jan, I mean, your peace research must also have touched a lot on just this issue of how war is being repackaged time and again to sell it to the general public. Can you speak to this? #M3 Well, thank you very much for having me on. I think there's a slight difference between how the Americans would have thought of this after the Cold War and how we think of it in Europe, because Europe has always been dependent, and NATO exists to ensure that the U.S. will not be harmed in case there's a war. But our foundation, for instance, in, I think, 1990, wrote a long piece about, exactly as you said, the opportunities that arose with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. As a young student, when I was writing my dissertation, I went down and interviewed officers in NATO who were very kind and very sincere, and they said two things to me. We are here because we never want war again like the Second World War, and we are here because the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were threatening to us, and we have to have security against that. So the logical thing would have been, which we also wrote 35 years ago, that NATO should have gone because NATO's raison d'être was the existence of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, which certainly, to a certain extent like today, were considered as enemies exclusively, psychologically, politically, and militarily. At that time, the philosophy was that if we had balance between each other, it would have a stabilizing effect. The Warsaw Pact always had a maximum of 60% to 80% of NATO's capacity in terms of military expenditures. Stronger unconventional armament, not that strong, comparatively strong, because the U.S. had nuclear weapons stationed, deployed in Europe. But the long story short was we totally missed the opportunity, deliberately I would say, that Gorbachev was a very decent, visionary, and moral man, in my view one of the greatest statesmen in modern times, if not the greatest, because what he said was let's create a European house, a kind of United Nations in Europe, a place where we discuss what kind of grievances we have. Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, put his name on this commission and talked about common security. Put simply, you can't be secure yourself if the other party is also not secure with you. And so I think what is very well described, and which you will find also in American archives such as the National Security Archive, is that the Clinton administration cheated because the deal was, and that is well documented, that all important Western leaders sat with Gorbachev in his dacha outside Moscow and promised him that if the two Germanys could be united into one Germany and be a member of NATO, we will not expand NATO one inch. Now, that is documented very well. NATO lies about it. The European Union lies about it because they use some other, you know, Gorbachev said something in some other kind of article or interview. -- 4 of 20 -- The fact is that all this is written down and can be found in archives. There's no discussion about it. There is also this huge book of 550 pages by Sarotte about this whole thing, who was a political scientist, a young student writing her dissertation in Berlin at the time. So that's where we decided that we, meaning the US and NATO, decided that w