 I'm Joshua Cooper. Welcome to Cooper Union. What's happening with human rights around our world on Think Tech Live broadcasting from our downtown studio in Honolulu, Hawaii in Moana, New Ikea. In today's episode, we're looking at world beyond war and a better way forward, humanity's new year resolution for peace on earth. It's an honor to be joined today by David Swanson, the executive director of world beyond war. And in the new year, it's time for humanity to make the ultimate new year's resolution for peace on earth. And world beyond war shares the message of advocating for the abolition of the institution of war and offers a new way forward for nations to unite for peace and justice. David, could you share with us a bit about the important work of world beyond war and how it began? It's an organization that was begun by a group of friends and colleagues January 2014 to be a global nonprofit activist and educational organization opposing all war, the entire industry of war, the whole machinery of militarism. So not based in any particular location and not opposing any particular war or weapon, much less advocating for humanitarian or proper war or better preparation for better wars, but actually trying to dismantle and defund and shift away from the entire idea of war through educational work and through nonviolent activist work. And that's what we've been doing for the past several years. That's amazing. And maybe you could share with us a bit of just how much does the world spend on war? And if we always say we want peace, it's astonishing how much of the budget goes to war in the United States of America, but maybe you could shed with us a little bit of insight around the entire planet. Well, in very rough terms, a couple of trillion dollars a year with about half of that or a trillion dollars a year from the United States government. That's including the now over 800 billion that you hear about that is the war budget that's passed by Congress and signed by the president with token descent from anyone anymore in Congress, plus other secret agencies and war funding that's not in that budget. This is an incredible unfathomable amount of money. It's over half of your tax dollars. It's over half of the money that the US Congress decides on year after year is going into war and preparations for more war. And it generates more wars predictably enough. There are people that imagine the more you spend on war, the fewer wars you get. The war spending is for peace. It makes a certain sense in your imagination, but we do have such a thing as observation and science. And it's been disproven. The more they spend on war, the more wars they get. And the more wars they fight for peace, the more wars they get. I'm not a libertarian. I don't object to war because it costs money. But the fact is that the money kills more people than the wars through its diversion from where it could be spent on human needs and environmental needs. And that will be true until the wars go nuclear. So the truth is we also could then provide and maybe we'll be on war also shares, how we could actually use that amount of money, that pot, and how that could go towards peace. And maybe you measure those two things out of by removing this many weapons that actually has this many abilities to be able to eliminate poverty and other aspects. Do you share that at World Beyond War? Yeah. In fact, we've put up billboards all over the world, making this sort of point. And in the United States, making the point that 3% of just U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth, on the whole planet. And if you want to look at ending the lack of clean drinking water on the planet, it's about 1% of just U.S. military spending. You want to look at a Green New Deal, an attempt to address climate collapse beyond the wildest dreams of any advocates for a Green New Deal. And it's less than 10% of the military budget, which has, of course, doubled and moving beyond that toward tripling in recent years and which, of course, in the U.S. military budget alone, is more than most other countries combined. And the U.S. and its NATO allies and weapons customers budgets are the vast majority, three quarters of global military spending. It's absolutely incredible, even for an ordinary country, but for the United States, this has never been seen before on this planet, this level of investment and this sort of domination of the rest of the world in terms of military investment. I think that you really bring up a good point, because I've seen statistics as well, that the United States, even if people said they would feel unsafe, if you look at how much we spend, you would have to add up all of our enemies, potential enemies, plus even more to even close to how much we spend. Could you maybe get into details a little bit more on how much the U.S. spends compared to even the next closest countries spending amount on military? The U.S. Congress could pass a law that said the U.S. cannot spend more than three times the next highest spender on militarism, and nobody around the world would have to do a thing except the U.S. Congress would have to reduce military spending, right? This is the extent of it. I mean, the in second place is China, and whenever the United States ups its military budget by tens of billions, hundreds of billions, China ups its military budget by hundreds of millions, and everybody freaks out. But China is less than a third of U.S. military spending. Russia is in single digits and was falling toward 5% of U.S. military spending before Ukraine. But what's happened since last February or March has been the biggest bonanza in decades for the weapons industry. Countries around the world have been shooting military budgets through the roof. Of course, they're all a tiny fraction of U.S. military spending, but they're all going up dramatically. And the bulk of that money goes to U.S. weapons companies. This is the problem with the U.S. economy. The five biggest weapons companies on earth are right within the Washington D.C. Beltway, the D.C. suburbs. And we talk about all the aid to Ukraine, the aid going to the poor people of Ukraine. Most of it is going to these weapons companies in the suburbs of Washington D.C. who are shipping weapons to Ukraine and calling that aid. Talking statistics, especially when we look at really the solid, we could call them the Beltway bandits or the bullet manufacturers. And it really gets to one point as well of world beyond war, you focus on demilitarization, the removal of many military installations around the globe. And the bases displace many people from their own homeland. But getting to the bases, how many bases does the United States have compared to any other country on the planet? And what are some of the names of those bases that maybe people wouldn't be aware of? Pretty much all of them. This is not a normal thing. When you watch a sports event on TV in the United States and they thank the sainted troops for watching from 175 countries, nobody questions that. Nobody wonders why 174 wouldn't be good enough. And in no other place on earth is there anything remotely like that. No other country on earth has bases in dozens of other countries. There are merely dozens of foreign bases when you put all the other countries' foreign bases together. But the United States, which has thousands of bases within the United States, the mainland, the homeland as they call it now, has perhaps a thousand, at least 700, 800, 900 bases depending on how you count them in other people's countries. This is not normal. This is a form of imperialism that's developed out of World War II, out of the chemicals and synthetics that allowed you not to need tropical materials and out of the airplane that allowed you to get places quickly. They abandoned traditional conquest. They let the Philippines go. They kept Puerto Rico. But the bases became the form of empire. So you put a little mini-United States segregated second-class citizens coming in to do the menial labor on the bases, training the occupants of the bases in racist bigotry. You put this in the middle of dozens of other countries around the world. The majority of countries around the world have a significant presence of U.S. troops. This is how people around the world see the United States through the presence of their troops occupying bases. And by the way, drinking and driving and gambling and prostituting and crashing their airplanes and all the rest of it, the same with any occupation of any country by any other country through world history. And these bases costing perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars every year are the primary means through which much of the world sees the United States. And they are environmentally catastrophic. And as part of their obliteration of the sovereignty of these places, the countries where they are don't have a say over the environmental damage, don't even get to research what it is. So I've just been writing a book the past weeks about the Monroe Doctrine, which hits 200 this year, and looking at all these wonderful leftist socialist popular presidents being elected in Latin America and the United States government not caring as much as you'd think it would given its history, of course, out of U.S. bases and U.S. embassies. And of course, the problem is that they've already got the bases. They've already got the troops. They've already got the militaries trained by the U.S. military funded and armed by the U.S. military, the elites educated in the United States, the corporate trade agreements in place, the police and the prison guards educated in the United States. They've got the debt. They've got the aid with the strings attached. But the bases are the biggest, most dramatic presence. And they aren't even questioned. They aren't even thought about. You talk with people in Central America about their new wonderful governments and independence and neutrality and sovereignty, and they don't even think we should get the U.S. bases out of here. You can imagine when the president of Ecuador said, you can keep your base if I can have one in Miami, Florida, and the U.S. got its base out quick. Imagine the outrage if Ecuador had a base in Miami, Florida and dozens of bases across the United States and had them for so long, nobody noticed anymore. This is the situation in much of the world. Now, you bring up some really interesting developments. We have the Pink Revolution. I believe they're calling it with Chile, with Honduras, but the important aspect of the bases and the legacy as well. And as you did describe, the bases displace many people from their own homelands. This includes farmlands. It includes reducing food sovereignty and even polluting local ecosystems. Can you maybe share some of the examples of some of those bases and why that would then breed a contempt for our country by the way that they're acting in those spaces by supposedly extending an arm or providing security, actually in many ways destroying the human security of the people in those communities there? Yeah. I mean, I said that traditional conquest was gone, but not completely. People are still, to this day, removed from their homes to make room for U.S. bases and have been for decades. And people have been demanding the right of return to whole island nations like Diego Garcia that were evicted for a U.S. British base. People in Greenland that were removed in Korea, in Okinawa that were displaced to make room for bases. And this happens across the world, including in Europe. And we're working with people on a mountain in Montenegro who are trying to protect their mountain from being turned into a massive military installation for NATO. Larger than the Montenegro military would have any idea what to do with, but for NATO. And the British are going there and telling them it's environmental to destroy your mountain. This is how you protect the environment. And the people want no part of it, but their government is bowing down. And this is the problem with the exception of Cuba. These governments are going along with the imposition of U.S. bases. They're not being put in there through constant war, but through the acceptance of governments, but against the will of the people in almost every case. They're very unpopular. And you poll countries around the world, and they see the greatest threat to peace as the U.S. military. Not just because of what they see on the news, but because of the U.S. military presence in their countries and what it does to train and prop up brutal governments. This is not just bases being accepted by relatively good nations, but bases propping up horrible dictatorships. There was a soccer tournament in Qatar, and everybody was out of their minds. But there are U.S. bases permanently there propping up a horrible dictatorship year in and year out, and nobody says a word, not even the activists objecting to the brutality of that government during the soccer tournament. So it's been accepted. You highlight two important points. You talked about examples of Khala Lee Nuna Greenland, which is, of course, Denmark and an ally, as well as Okinawa Ryukyu in Japan. Those are two examples of allies, but maybe you could continue a little bit more as well on some of the countries, such as Qatar that was brought up with the labor standards and other aspects. But what are other bases of nations that were propping up that people would find really hard to sum up or be not really true? That couldn't be our government. Where else is that taking place? A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called 20 Dictatorships Currently Supported by the United States, and I looked at the most oppressive governments around the world, the 50 worst governments by the U.S. governments own understanding, not necessarily mine, but close to mine, and 48 of them were supported by the U.S. military. Most of them had U.S. bases. I think 44 of them were sold U.S. weapons and about 33 of them were given funding for their military by the U.S. military and many of them trained by the U.S. military. So U.S. military bases and weapons and private and public staff to maintain and upgrade the weapons in brutal dictatorships is the norm. It's not the exception. Cuba and North Korea, as you hear so much about, are the exception. The norm is to prop up these horrible governments. Saudi Arabia has a permanent office for selling it more U.S. weapons. It is the biggest U.S. weapons customer. The U.S. is the biggest supplier of weapons to any category of countries, including brutal dictatorships. So this is the norm. The biggest places for U.S. troops are places like South Korea and Japan and Germany and Italy, but they're everywhere and they're in significant number in not just in Qatar but in every neighboring country in the Middle East. Studying statistics and really important to wake up, especially in the new year, to kind of think of this in a new way, you also highlight a lot about connecting the issues of security, sustainability, and looking at that, looking at the climate crisis, military is also producing a huge amount of the carbon. I mean, in a way, it's creating a carbon bomb that's detonating over humanity that really makes it difficult to see if we'll be able to reach that goal of 1.5 because the military is not even included. Could you maybe share a bit about how the U.S. is contributing with the military to actually making our chances of human survival even more of a rare opportunity to be able to organize and be able to save our planet and our island earth? Yeah, I mean, we would be, I think, destroying the earth's climate even without the contribution of the military, except that the military gets in the way of any cooperation and any self-governance. The people of Guyana is trying to sue to stop ExxonMobil from offshore drilling huge amounts of oil, don't have control of their own country, even though they've put in their constitution the protection of the environment. And there's no way for Russia and the United States to sit down or United States and China to sit down and talk about protecting the environment when they're at war and planning for bigger war. But the military itself is a significant contributor to environmental damage, not just the incredible damage of the wars, which is trillions of dollars in economic cost as well, and of the weapons testing, but just the fossil fuels, you know, I mean, overall globally, it's under 10%, but it's such a huge chunk and the United States dominates it so heavily that the United States has seen to it that it's excluded from any environmental agreements and even reporting on how much it is is excluded. And it took huge activism at the COP 27 the previous year in Scotland to get it even talked about at the COP 28 in Egypt, another good US weapons customer, military offspring and brutal dictatorship this past year. And it's gone nowhere thus far in the US Congress just getting a requirement to address military contribution. I mean, does the military have some secret other second planet somewhere that it's polluting? Why would it not be included in measures supposed to protect the climate of this one and only planet? No, you really are connecting like Earth democracy issues. Reminds me of the movie The Triangle of Sadness where they're having the dinner and they said, oh, what do you do? And they say, oh, we insured democracy. And you're thinking, oh, it's going to be ballot box or an NGO. And there are, of course, arms dealers saying how they have saved the planet in many ways and also insured democracy for people. But I think what you're highlighting on your website and the work of World Beyond War is asking us to pull aside some blinders that no presidential candidate wants to talk about for fear of looking soft, that very few elected officials in the Senate or in the House would campaign on, and even have a genuine conversation about the state of what really is at stake and how do we get towards peace going forward? Well, I think that's very, very true and very, very important. But there are some exceptions, I think, to the idea that no one will campaign on peace. In fact, they campaign on peace significantly more than they act for peace. If you look at even the Joe Biden for President campaign, even the Democratic Party platform of 2020 and the war on Yemen, reduced military spending and the endless wars in places like Afghanistan make peace rather than war. And of course, they do the opposite and nobody makes a peep. But you look at, I've been looking at Latin America and writing about the Monroe Doctrine and you have the Biden White House talking as if they understand exactly what to do. We're going to address the root causes of immigration by going and helping people make their own countries better places rather than making them horrific torture zones. They understand, it's not that hard to understand, they're even willing to say these things. But what they do, these corporate trade agreements, these corporate funds and empowerment that give hold zones of Central America to sovereign rule by corporations, this doesn't do what they say they're trying to do. So we have to have the public pressure to make peace because the support for it is there. When it's in the news, the votes for it are there. If the candidates were just as good as what they campaign on, we'd be significantly better off. The problem is when they don't do what they say they're going to do, people don't get in the streets like they need to. You're bringing up some excellent points and also talking about people powering and what's possible. And when we look at world beyond war and you're demanding building bridges across humanity instead of more bombs on borders, it really also would show that the U.S. would probably be greater appreciated by contributing and assisting through aid and assistance and helping people because as you did bring up, all the issues are connected. The people fleeing Central and South America, it's a lot of is due to the climate crisis. One, cyclone wipes out an entire decade of development. The other aspect is a regime that's then torturing them forces people to flee. So the United States could learn maybe what China is seeing. When China comes into a land, they find out that the people actually dislike them more than before they came there. So we'd want to at least learn from that negative experience as well of what's happened in some places with their models of development with the Belt Road Initiative to say, we've got to find a new way forward. And maybe the sustainable development goals are one pathway that should be the guiding star and how we deal with one another as well as next year, this year being the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those are other ways that we could see partnerships as opposed to the monoduction, which probably should be left way long ago in other centuries. Well, never should have existed. There wasn't a time when it was a good thing, but I completely agree. But I don't think you have to go to China to find examples of blowback when 9-11 was clearly about troops in Saudi Arabia and weapons in Palestine. And in fact, a study some years back found 95% of foreign terrorism around the world was aimed explicitly and openly aimed at getting some country to stop occupying some other country. There's not yet been a single instance of terrorist blowback angered by the provision of food or water or medicine. Doesn't happen. Nobody resents that stuff. And when you had this war, this endless war on terror kickoff in the early 2000s, you had Spain have terrorist bombings and say, you know what we're going to do? We're going to pull every damn Spanish soldier out of Iraq and say, we're sorry, not another terrorist bomb about from the, except from the Basques. And that's over with now to peacefully in Spain. You have London have bombings and say, we're going to up the stakes. We're going to attack more. We're going to bomb more towns. We're going to kick in more doors. The same approach that the United States practices and it's counterproductive. And they know it's counterproductive. It's not a secret that it's counterproductive. They just don't care or they appreciate it. Certainly the weapons companies love them for it. So you highlight a certain aspect of the connection between campaign contributions and impact on our domestic and foreign policy. What are some steps that you think that we can take as people to exercise our, you know, everybody has New Year's resolutions, we can exercise our political muscles, get a little bit more fit for freedom. What could we do as a people to guarantee that America is doing the right thing, but also that people around the planet are having peace on earth and how they see us as allies and positive agents of change. You can join with us at World Beyond War or join other peace groups at World Beyond War. We're a global group and we have meetings online and offline with people from around the world and discuss our issues as global citizens. We work on local and regional and global campaigns. We pass resolutions. We divest funds from the weapons companies. We prevent the construction of more bases and get other bases closed. We lobby against weapons funding and war creation and help and wars and prevent wars. You know, this is something that anybody can do and we do educational events that are very empowering for those educated and for those doing the educating because it's so darn easy to go into a classroom and provide basic facts that everybody should have been provided with but weren't and moved the whole room from support for war to the belief that war can never be justified. Thank you so much, David, for joining us on this first episode of Cooper Union for 2023. I think it really provides information on how we can make an impact and then be able to influence foreign affairs to really work towards world peace in a genuine way. So thank you so much, Mahalo, for joining. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.