“A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, the one I feed the most” (George Bernard Shaw).
There is no doubt that we are feeding mostly the mean and evil dog of war. The world’s taxpayers paid €2 trillion to their national war machines in 2023, double what was spent in 2001. That is the highest ever and more than 600 times the regular budget of the United Nations (UN).
The UN was set up in 1946 “to maintain international peace and security by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law and to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that, in 2023, military expenditure by NATO member states (where 14% of the world population live) reached over €1,300 billion, or 55 per cent of world spending.
The US spent €900 billion of that sum, more than double the expenditure of China (€290 billion) and Russia (€109) combined.
While fattening the mean and evil dog of war, the good dog of peace and humanitarian assistance is being starved. In its ‘Global Humanitarian Overview’, the UN estimates that 305 million people across 32 countries and nine refugee-hosting regions will require humanitarian assistance in the coming year, with a staggering price tag of €47 billion.
The UN report concludes that: “While €47 billion is a sizeable amount, it pales in comparison to other global expenditures – it is less than two per cent of global military expenditure, around four per cent of the global banking industry’s profits, and just 12 per cent of the fossil fuel industry’s average annual free cash flow.”
The UN’s Tom Fletcher, responsible for running its humanitarian assistance programmes says: “We are dealing with a poly-crisis right now globally and it is the most vulnerable people in the world who are paying the price.” Only 43 per cent of the €50 billion appeal for this year had been met. Underfunding in 2023 has seen an 80 per cent reduction in food assistance in Syria, cuts to protection services in Myanmar and diminished water and sanitation aid in cholera-prone Yemen.
Fletcher also said: “The suffering behind the numbers is all the more unconscionable for being man-made. Wars in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine are marked by the ferocity and intensity of the killing, the complete disregard for international law, and the deliberate obstruction of our humanitarian movement’s effort to save lives.”
At least 281 aid workers were killed across 19 countries in 2024. This is more than in any other year on record, surpassing the previous record of 280 aid workers killed in 2023.
In 2023, the US spent €900 billion on arms, more than double the expenditure of China (€290 billion) and Russia (€109) combined- Evarist Bartolo
Camilla Waszink, of the Norwegian Refugee Council, described the appeal’s acknowledgement that millions of vulnerable people would not be assisted as “devastating”: “When the richest people on Earth can go to space as a tourist and trillions of US dollars are used annually on global military expenditure, it is incomprehensible that we as an international community are unable to find the necessary funding to provide displaced families with shelter and prevent children from dying of hunger.”
Fatalities from violent events have risen by 37 per cent year on year, with an increase in the Middle East and North Africa of over 315 per cent, and more than 200,000 people have been killed globally, according to the Armed Conflict Survey 2024 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies released a month ago.
What a long way we still have to go to reach the aspiration in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 for “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want”.
Our future at risk
Saudi astronaut Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud described the experience of the crew on the flight of NASA’s space shuttle programme in 1985, looking at our planet while orbiting around it 321 kilometres away: “The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.”
Back here on earth, we struggle to get beyond the first day of clinging to our countries. Ninety-five-year-old American top diplomat Jack Matlock (who accompanied president George H. Bush for the 1989 Malta Summit with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev) in his most recent book Looking back to look ahead describes how he came to realise that we can only be present to each other through our countries but that should not necessarily mean that we are condemned to what Thomas Hobbes calls an existence of “the war of all against all”.
Matlock writes: “As I learned more about the world, its varied cultures and histories, it became clear that a world government was not only an impossible goal; it was not even a desirable one. We live physically in one world, but not culturally. I came to understand that if nuclear war was to be avoided disputes between nuclear powers would have to be settled by diplomacy and compromise.
“I now feel that the political leaders of my country, with the help of others, are leading us dangerously astray, ignoring the lessons we should have learned from two world wars and the invention and spread of weapons of mass destruction. What I do believe is that attempts by the United States and its allies to dominate the world by military and economic coercion will fail. We and our allies must find a way to promote the peaceful settlement of disputes rather than encouraging and supporting violence. Until we do this, the future of humanity is in jeopardy.”
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.