The UN report, released last month, calls for a fundamental recalibration of global security and development strategies, prioritizing diplomacy and international cooperation to reverse the current trend of escalating military spending. Credit: UNDP

By Alice Slater
NEW YORK, Jan 6 2026 (IPS)

The United Nations issued a year end Fact Sheet: Rising global military expenditures, starkly illuminating that last year’s record high of $2.7 trillion in military expenditures, caused a cascade of devastating consequences to human well-being, the environment, possibilities for avoiding climate collapse, as well as blows to employment, ending hunger and poverty, providing health care, education, and other ills, due to a lack of adequate funding support.

The Fact Sheet does an admirable job of illustrating the shocking maldistribution of States massive military expenditures and what that money could buy in many instances, such as to end hunger and malnutrition, provide clean water and sanitation, education, environmental remediation, and so much more.

But isn’t it time for the UN to issue a Fact Sheet: Lost Opportunities to Halt Rising Military Expenditures and Heal the Earth? After all, just this summer on the 80th Anniversary of WWII, Russia and China issued a Joint Statement by the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on Global Strategic Security in which they urged that in acknowledging that anniversary and the founding of the United Nations, States and their associations “should not seek to ensure their own security at the expense and to the detriment of the security of other States.” adding that ”the destinies of the peoples of all countries are interrelated.”

Even a cursory examination of the sorry history of the United States and its nuclear alliance, in seeking to secure military domination at the expense of Russia and China, shows a sad list of missed opportunities to accept Russia and China’s offers to negotiate for peace and disarmament, which would have freed up trillions of dollars over the years to address the crisis we now face for preserving all life on earth.

The most recent opportunity that should be on the list, (met with deafening silence by the corrupt western media, laboring under the heavy thumb of their corporate military sponsors, who delight in the billions lining their pockets to produce the burgeoning war machine) was China and Russia’s Joint Statement criticizing the US misbegotten Golden Dome space project and opposing any countries use of outer space for armed confrontation.”

They urged negotiations based on the Russian-Chinese draft treaty to prevent weapons and use of force in outer space, proposed at the UN Committee on Disarmament in 2008 and 2014, where consensus is required to negotiate a treaty and the United States vetoed it each time, preventing any discussion. Amazingly, they further pledged that to prevent an arms race in outer space and promote peace in space, they would “agree to promote on a global scale the international initiative/political commitment not to be the first to deploy weapons in outer space.” In other words, No First Use.

While peace in space is the most recent Lost Opportunity, the first Lost Opportunity happened in 1946 when President Truman rejected Stalin’s proposal that the US turn the bomb over to international supervision at the newly formed UN, so Russia got the bomb.

President Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s plea to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down and Gorbachev released all of Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation, thus losing the opportunity to abolish our nuclear arsenals.

More Lost Opportunities: the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) up to Russia’s border despite promises made when the wall came down that NATO would not expand east of a reunified Germany:

President Clinton’s refusal of Putin’s offer to go down to 1000 bombs each, and then call all nuclear states to negotiate for their elimination, provided the US stopped developing missile sites in Romania.

President Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put the new base in Romania; President Trump put one in Poland.

President Obama rejected Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war! [i]

Had the US been more open over the years to cooperation, instead of losing so many opportunities to make peace, we would be so much more able to deal with the urgency of preserving a livable planet for all and avoiding the dire consequences enumerated in the new UN Fact Sheet on global military expenditures. It’s still not too late to take up the Russian-Chinese proposal for peace in space. May wiser heads prevail.

[i] https://pirm.medium.com/why-no-international-treaty-for-cybersecurity-to-ban-cyber-attacks-5a53d8b3fdd1

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/milex-docs/MILEX_UN_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Alice Slater serves on the Boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and is a UN NGO Representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

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Sculpture depicting St. George slaying the dragon. The dragon is created from fragments of Soviet SS-20 and United States Pershing nuclear missiles. Credit: UN Photo/Milton Grant

By Alice Slater
NEW YORK, Oct 2 2024 (IPS)

The world may have dodged an immediate bullet when the US intelligence agencies warned, this week, that by giving in to Ukraine’s pleading for long range missiles that could attack targets deep into Russia, we would be poking the Russian bear beyond its patience without even influencing the outcome of the war in Ukraine’s favor.

There had been a sense of waiting with bated breath in the wake of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin recent announcement that he would lower the threshold for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, as the US and its NATO allies broadcasted their plans to ignore a repeated “red line” articulated by US President Biden not to provide arms to Ukraine which could be launched deep inside Russia.

Britain is playing its usual provocative role by sending clear messages that it would welcome US approval to let Ukraine use its “Storm Shadow” long-range missiles. We just got a short breather, in light of this recently issued public US intelligence evaluation.

Despite repeated requests to the US from Russian President Vladmir Putin to honor US promises made to Gorbachev and Yeltsin that the US would not expand NATO east of a unified Germany, when the wall came down and Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact and Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe without a shot, the US, driven by visions of Empire, steadily expanded NATO eastward.

It began with Clinton’s annexation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, and Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia between 2009 and 2017. At one point Putin was so dismayed at this expansion, he asked the Clinton administration if Russia could join NATO, but he was denied membership.

Putin made it very clear to the US and NATO that Russia, which shares a long border with Ukraine, would not tolerate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. After the US supported a 2014 coup d’état replacing the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with Petro Poroshenko who immediately announced that only the Ukrainian language would be recognized in Ukraine, a civil war broke out in the Eastern part of the country where the majority of the people were Russian and Russian speaking. More than 14,000 people were killed in that war before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Putin provided a draft agreement in 2021 to the US proposing that Ukraine remain neutral and that the Donbass region, undergoing the civil war, remain in Ukraine as a federation and have the right to speak Russian. The US completely ignored the proposal and Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Putin was negotiating for a ceasefire with Zelensky six months after the invasion, but Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister came to Ukraine and told Zelensky not to make the deal! And the slaughter continues, with more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 soldiers killed.

Thanks to the brief respite we just received from imminent nuclear annihilation, thanks to the sensible US intelligence services who took Putin’s recent warnings as a reason for caution in pursuing a headlong and heedless expansion of military aid to Ukraine, it is time to change the conversation with bold new proposals.

Proposals that are guaranteed to bring us a respite from the growing terror. Proposals that will bring a shift in planetary consciousness allowing us to respond cooperatively to the impending cataclysmic climate disaster down the road! Mother Earth grows impatient with the folly of humankind.

Here are a series of steps that are guaranteed to bring us peace on earth if the US is ready to mobilize against the MICIMATT (Military Industrial, Congressional Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank complex) and work for peace!

– Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals in the UN and in frequent speeches for a treaty to ban weapons in space

– Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals in the UN to negotiate a cyberwar ban treaty

– Reinstate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and get US missiles placed by Obama and Trump out of Poland and Romania

– Remove US nuclear weapons stationed in five NATO states: Turkey, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium as a deal for Russia removing its recently placed weapons from Belarus

– Take all nuclear weapons off high alert and separate the warheads from their delivery system
as China does–the wisdom of the East

– Dismantle NATO and pull it back from Russia’s border immediately

The ball, as they say, is in the US court. Or as Pogo Possum, a character in Walt Kelly’s 1950s comic strip was known to say, “We met the enemy and he is us!”

There is no doubt that Russia and China would be willing partners in these new initiatives. They have been proposing them to the United States for more than ten years!!

Alice Slater serves on the Boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and as an UN NGO representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

IPS UN Bureau

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Russia vetoed a draft resolution in March 2024 to renew the mandate of the Security Council's 1718 Committee panel of experts monitoring sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Alice Slater
NEW YORK, Jul 22 2024 (IPS)

On the heels of a new alliance announced this summer by Russia and North Korea for a pact pledging mutual defense, with the support of China, it is now shockingly being suggested in South Korea that it review its security policy with the US and end its reliance on the US guarantee, to employ on South Koreas’ behalf, US nuclear weapons as part of its “nuclear umbrella”.

The “umbrella” is offered to all NATO states as well as the Pacific states of Japan, Australia, and South Korea. Such questioning is evidence of the growing havoc faced in the world by the failure of the United States to make good on its legal obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for good faith efforts for nuclear disarmament.

The nuclear umbrella, to the extent that it includes the stationing of nuclear weapons in five NATO states (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey) is in itself an illegal violation of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty in which five nuclear weapons states, the US, Russia, UK, France, and China, promised to make “good faith efforts” for nuclear disarmament while all the other countries of the world agreed not to get nuclear weapons.

Everyone, including South Korea signed the NPT except for Israel, Pakistan and India who developed their own nuclear arsenals. The NPT had a Faustian bargain that if a country promised not to get nuclear weapons, they would have an “inalienable right” to so-called “peaceful” nuclear power.

Since every “peaceful” nuclear power plant produced the material needed to make nuclear weapons the NPT gives those nations the keys to the bomb factory, North Korea walked out of the NPT and used its nuclear power to produce a nuclear arsenal. Iran has been enriching its nuclear materials but has not yet made a bomb.

The fact that Russia is allying with North Korea and China at this time is a result of the failure of US diplomacy and the drive by the US military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-think tank complex (MICIMATT) to expand the US empire beyond its 800 US military bases in 87 nations.

The US is now surrounding China with new bases recently established in the Pacific and forming AUKUS, a new military alliance with Australia, the UK and the US. The US has been breaking its agreement made with China in 1972 as we now are arming Taiwan despite promises made by Nixon and Kissinger to recognize China and remain neutral on the question of the future of Taiwan, to where the anti-communist forces retreated after the Chinese Revolution.

The US, after the end of the Cold War in 1989 with Russia walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1992 and put missile bases in Poland and Romania, walked out of the 1987 Intermediate Missile Forces Treaty negotiated by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1972, expanded NATO up to Russia’s border despite promises to Gorbachev that we wouldn’t expand NATO “one inch” eastward beyond a unified Germany.

Indeed, horrified by the NATO expansion, Putin at one point asked Clinton if Russia could be invited to join NATO which was refused, and announced often and pointedly in the years leading up to the Ukrainian War, that taking Ukraine into NATO was a “red line” for Russia!

The Empire was indifferent and kept expanding until we reached this sorry and perilous moment we are experiencing now. In retaliation, Putin just put Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus—a first incidence of Russian nuclear sharing!

Ironically, the underlying rationale for Nixon and Kissinger making peace with China was to prevent a more powerful alliance between Russia and China.

The US will be reaping the whirlwind if it doesn’t comply with its nuclear disarmament obligations and take the path to peace. More nuclear armed countries such as South Korea may proliferate. Saudi Arabia is currently seeking “peaceful” nuclear power without safeguards on its use.

With either nuclear annihilation or cataclysmic climate collapse facing our beleaguered planet, it’s time to cooperate with other countries—make peace not war!!

Alice Slater serves on the boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and is a UN NGO Representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

IPS UN Bureau

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Aerial view of the European Parliament in Brussels

By Alice Slater
NEW YORK, Jun 6 2024 (IPS)

It is quite astonishing and clearly insane, that Manfred Weber, the German leader of the European Union’s center-right European People’s Party, now expected to come in first in the European Parliament election scheduled on June 6-9th, is calling for the EU’s own nuclear “deterrent”—arguing that the US-stationed nuclear weapons in five NATO states, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherland, and Turkey, may be inadequate protection for Europe’s security should Trump, that great friend of Russia, be elected!

There is a total disconnect from reality in the western world. It is driven by what has been described as an expansion of the warning of former General Eisenhower, commander of US World War II forces that worked with Russia to defeat the Nazi onslaught, which happened to kill the astounding number of 27 million Russians, in his outgoing presidential address.

Eisenhower warned against the undue influence of the Military Industrial Complex–which has been described by Ray McGovern, former CIA agent and founder of VIPS (Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) as the MICIMATT– the Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic, Think Tank complex! They are all making a killing on killing!

The US, leading this doomsday machine, is hurtling us towards destruction based on a flouting of all the laws and treaties that have been painfully negotiated and put in place to avoid WWIII, for what it calls its “rules-based order”.

This was the alibi it used when it bombed Kosovo over Russia’s UN Security Council veto, despite its UN treaty obligation not to commit any war of aggression without Security Council approval unless under “imminent threat of attack”, which could hardly be rationally expected to come from Kosovo!

Although the US violated no treaty, it’s steady expansion of NATO eastward, despite well documented promises to Gorbachev, when he miraculously dissolved the Warsaw pact, without a shot, and expressed his apprehension at the Nazi slaughter Russia had suffered with a hope that a unified Germany would not be part of NATO.

Reassurances were given to him that we would never allow Germany to commit aggression again and that we would not expand NATO one inch to the east. At one point, Russia was so threatened by the expansion of NATO that Putin proposed to Clinton that Russia be invited to join. The US turned him down.

And of course, Putin actually tabled a proposed agreement two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, promising not to take action if Ukraine remained neutral and was not accepted into NATO. Bush walked out of the 1972 ABM Treaty we had with the USSR to stop the proliferation of anti-ballistic missiles, and the US put missile bases in Romania and Poland.

Russia (as well as China-the other enemy we are creating to keep the war machine going) has been very forthcoming in seeking nuclear disarmament and peace. After the devastating destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin asked Truman to turn the bomb over to the UN which we jointly founded “to end the scourge of war” and the US turned him down. So, Russia got the bomb!

Gorbachev, after the wall came down, asked Reagan to join the USSR in eliminating nuclear weapons, provided the US gave up its Star Wars policy to “dominate and control the military use of space”. Reagan turned him down. Russia and China both tabled treaties for a space weapons ban at the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva where consensus is required to discuss negotiations.

The US vetoed it, refusing even any discussion in 2008, and again in 2014. Putin proposed to Clinton that we cut our nuclear arsenals to 1,000 bombs each and call the six other nuclear armed countries to the table for a treaty to abolish them. The US turned him down.

When the US and Israel boasted about their use of the Stuxnet virus to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment plant, Putin approached Obama to negotiate a cyberwar ban treaty. The US turned him down.

The demonization of Russia and Putin and now China as well, is a major project of the MICIMATT! The EU has bought the brainwashing caused by the manufacture of a false narrative to keep the war machine going.

In the words of Pogo Possum, a Walt Kelly cartoon character during the first Red Scare, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

Alice Slater serves on the Boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. She is the UN NGO Representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and on the Advisory Board of Nuclear Ban U.S. in support of the 2017 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

IPS UN Bureau

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Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO chief, addresses a crowd in Austin, Texas. Credit: DVIDSHUB/Texas Military Forces/Photo by Staff Sgt. Eric Wilson/CC-BY-2.0

By Alice Slater
NEW YORK, Sep 2 2014 (IPS)

It is ironic that at this moment in history when so many people and nations around the world are acknowledging the 100^th anniversary of our planet’s hapless stumble into World War I, great powers and their allies are once again provoking new dangers where governments appear to be sleepwalking towards a restoration of old Cold War battles.

A barrage of conflicting information is broadcast in the various national and nationalistic media with alternative versions of reality that provoke and stoke new enmities and rivalries across national borders.

Moreover, NATO’s new disturbing saber-rattling, with its chief, Anders Rasmussen, announcing that NATO will deploy its troops for the first time in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended, building a “readiness action plan”, boosting Ukraine’s military capacity so that, “ In the future you will see a more visible NATO presence in the east”, while disinviting Russia from the upcoming NATO meeting in Wales, opens new possibilities for endless war and hostilities.

The world can little afford the trillions of dollars in military spending and trillions and trillions of brain cells wasted on war when our very Earth is under stress and needs the critical attention of our best minds [...].
With the U.S. and Russia in possession of over 15,000 of the world’s 16,400 nuclear weapons, humanity can ill-afford to stand by and permit these conflicting views of history and opposing assessments of the facts on the ground lead to a 21^st Century military confrontation between the great powers and their allies.

While sadly acknowledging the trauma suffered by the countries of Eastern Europe from years of Soviet occupation, and understanding their desire for the protection of the NATO military alliance, we must remember that Russia lost 20 million people during WWII to the Nazi onslaught and are understandably wary of NATO expansion to their borders in a hostile environment.

This despite a promise to Gorbachev, when the wall came down peacefully and the Soviet Union ended its post-WWII occupation of Eastern Europe, that NATO would not be expanded eastward, beyond the incorporation of East Germany into that rusty Cold War alliance.

Russia has lost the protection of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which the U.S. abandoned in 2001, and warily observes missile bases metastasizing ever closer to its borders, in new NATO member states, while the U.S. rejects repeated Russian efforts for negotiations on a treaty to ban weapons in space, or Russia’s prior application for membership in NATO.

Why do we still have NATO anyway? This Cold War relic is being used to fire up new hostilities and divisions between Russia and the rest of Europe.

Civil Society demands that an independent international inquiry be commissioned to review events in Ukraine leading up to the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 and of the procedures being used to review the catastrophic aftermath, including this latest outbreak of hostile actions from NATO.

Indeed, Russia has already called for an investigation of the facts surrounding the Malaysian airplane crash. The international investigation should factually determine the cause of the accident and hold responsible parties accountable to the families of the victims and the citizens of the world who fervently desire peace and peaceful settlements of any existing conflicts.

More importantly, it should include a fair and balanced presentation of what led to the deterioration of U.S.–Russian relations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the new hostile and polarized posture that the U.S. and Russia with their allies find themselves in today with NATO now threatening greater militarisation and provocations against Russia in Eastern Europe.

The United Nations Security Council, with U.S. and Russian agreement, has already passed Resolution 2166 addressing the Malaysian jet crash, demanding accountability, full access to the site and a halt to military activity, which has been painfully disregarded at various times since the incident.

One of the provisions of Resolution 2166 notes that the Council “[s]upports efforts to establish a full, thorough and independent international investigation into the incident in accordance with international civil aviation guidelines.”

Further, the 1909 revised Convention on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes adopted at the 1899 Hague International Peace Conference has been used successfully to resolve issues between states so that war was avoided in the past.

Regardless of the forum where the evidence is gathered and fairly evaluated, all the facts and circumstances should be made known to the world as to how we got to this unfortunate state of affairs on our planet today and what might be the solutions.

All the members of NATO together with Russia and Ukraine are urged to end the endless arms race, which only feeds the military-industrial complex that U.S. President Eisenhower warned against.

They must engage in diplomacy and negotiations, not war and hostile alienating actions.

The world can little afford the trillions of dollars in military spending and trillions and trillions of brain cells wasted on war when our very Earth is under stress and needs the critical attention of our best minds and thinking, and the abundance of resources mindlessly diverted to war to be made available for the challenges confronting us to create a livable future for life on earth.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

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