Transcription
If there is a war in Europe, it will be because of NATO's expansion and the consequences of it. And secondly, because we have too few intellectuals, too few knowledgeable people, too few good advisers about security, peace, mediation, and things like that. Europe made its huge mistake by allowing the bombing in '99 of Yugoslavia, which was from that day, I would say, NATO has become an illegal organization or a criminal organization or a law-offending organization.
Welcome to World Affairs in Context, everybody. I'm Lena Petrova. Today, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Jan Oberg. Jan is a Swedish peace and conflict researcher, author, and co-founder of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, which you can find on Substack and other platforms that I will link in the description below. Jan is known for his independent analysis and outspoken criticism of militarization. He has spent years examining the deeper forces driving geopolitical conflict from the Middle East and Ukraine to the growing tensions between the United States, China, and Russia. Jan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you so much also for the beautiful introduction. [laughter] I'm glad to be here.
Well, it's my pleasure to host you. You've spent decades, of course, studying peace and conflicts. And when you look at the world today, are we entering a fundamentally more dangerous era than the Cold War, or is this a different kind of global instability altogether?
Well, I think since I lived through the first Cold War, as they call it, um, ending with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union falling apart, um, I think this period is more dangerous. Um, but I'm not, I don't belong to the doomsday [clears throat] people who say we're in the beginning of World War III and blah, blah, blah. I hate this type of, uh, unscientific emotional frustration airing because it takes away hope from people. Uh, and there, there's no theory for when a World War III would, would, would start and whether or not it would be conventional or with nuclear weapons. But the reason I say that the old one was a safer place was, first of all, politicians knew something. Politicians at that time had either parents or had themselves experienced the Second World War. They knew that war was something that should never happen. Secondly, they were people who could read and write books, many of them. Third, they were personalities with a vision, from Willy Brandt or Olof Palme or Bruno Kreisky or on Olof Palme or Gorbachov. Uh, they were people who knew that these kinds of things are dangerous potentially if you make the wrong decisions. Uh, furthermore, there was more of a balance between the two systems, uh, in the sense that the Warsaw Pact were always about 60-70% of NATO's military expenditures. Meaning there was some kind of reason to say that, uh, peace has to do with balance. Where we are roughly balancing each other, there is a better chance of not of, of, of, well, not having peace, but at least mutually, uh, understood positions. Um, and one very strong one would not throw himself over a very, uh, weaker one. Uh, it was also the period in which we had contacts through the what was called the Iron Curtain at that time. Um, military people would meet each other, have dinners together, talk about each other's exercises in order to avoid that an exercise could be interpreted by the other side as the beginning of a war. That's why you had the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was an excellent thing, including also, uh, uh, the US and Canada at the time. But that was a forum for discussion. This perverse idea that has been introduced after the Russian invasion [clears throat] or special military operation in Ukraine. I've never seen that in the, in the first Cold War, namely that you cut off completely everything. You cannot even have a, a Russian young pianist playing in the Western world. We can hardly go there. I think there are only two airports in Europe for which you can go to Moscow now. Um, embassy staff has been reduced, forced to be reduced. We have stopped energy cooperation. The Americans destroyed Nord Stream and what have you. All these things are, in my view, um, making the present situation more dangerous because [clears throat] everything I just said now is what we don't have today. When Russia invaded Ukraine, its military expenditures were 8% of NATO's, and NATO is arguing that we must have more and more and more, 5% of gross national product and blah, blah, blah.
If there is a war in Europe, it will be because of NATO's expansion and the consequences of it. And secondly, because we have too few intellectuals, too few knowledgeable people, too few good advisers about security, peace, mediation, and things like that in the ministries of foreign affairs, defense ministries, and prime minister's office. There's nowhere in the world, but certainly not in Europe, anyone who has an advisor in peace, just somebody who's educated in peace, non-violent conflict resolution, mediation, reconciliation, those types of things doesn't exist. Europe made its huge mistake by allowing the bombing in '99 of Yugoslavia, which was from that day, I would say, uh, NATO has become an illegal organization or a criminal organization or a law-offending organization because it's a purely defensive charter or treaty that says that the members shall come to each other's rescue if one is attacked. Nobody was attacked. They intervened in Yugoslavia, in which they had nothing to do. NATO has nothing to do in Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Kosovo. I was a mediator for four years in the Kosovo conflict. I know quite well what was happening. NATO has nothing to do in Ukraine. Nothing. Had nothing to do in, you know, Libya or whatever. It's out of area, but it's also out of law, out of treaty operations. Now, the Europeans went along with that because the Americans wanted it that way. And so what makes us more, the situation more dangerous today is that Europe is totally submissive, unable to distance itself from, uh, a more and more, um, violent, um, unpredictable, dangerous, militarist, half-fascist, proto-fascist United States of America, which it was not at that time. So there are many reasons, I would say, it's more dangerous today to be in Europe. But I would also hurry to say there was one factor at that time that did not, that does exist today, but did not exist at that time, and that was the rapid decline and demise and final fall of the US empire. There was nobody talking about the US empire falling in the '60s and '70s. Um, almost nobody. We were a few that it will fall because all empires fall, but that was a kind of, you know, gross statement. But the fact is now that it's getting more and more desperate in the Western world because the United States is losing basically everything it once had, and turning, and the rest of the world is turning its back on, on the US, and that makes it very, very significant and very tragic that Europe has not been able to give you, to, to represent, let's say, a different or another West that the rest of the world could work with. But that submissiveness, this, this totally, "We do, we do and say what we're supposed to say. We just listen to his master's voice in Washington." You know, you could just as well close down foreign ministries and defense ministries in Europe. They have never thought an independent thought the last 20 years. I say that because I sat in the Danish government's commission for security and disarmament all the '80s, and I know what kind of intellectual capacity went into decision-making in Denmark. As a so-called footnote nation, and a nation that was had decided not to have American bases, not to have foreign, uh, weapons, not to stored, and not to participate in, um, NATO's nuclear planning group. We were special in Scandinavia. And I don't have to tell you now, we're totally militarized with, uh, 43 American bases in Scandinavia, a membership of NATO for Finland and, and Sweden. You know, the whole thing is going to fall apart because these are decisions that won't last because NATO is falling apart too. So, yes, more dangerous, but also that dangerous period is going to be short. And if we survive it, and if you and I see, and the rest of the world see a world without the US empire and without NATO, it's going to be a fantastic world. Think about the kind of world we could have when these two factors are gone. I'm not talking about America. I never mean anti-American. I'm saying the empire. There's no empire that has lasted forever, and this one is going down. It will be the last one in human history. The Chinese are not that stupid.
Yan, there is a, um, there is [clears throat] an argument to be made that any state that hosts US military bases is not truly sovereign. Do you feel that there is, is there any substance to that argument? Would you agree with that?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I have been an advisor both to the Danish and the Swedish government since I'm a Danish citizen and lived most of my life in Sweden. Uh, to the government, to the ministries of foreign affairs in the '80s when I was the director of the Lund University Peace Research Institute, which was closed down in '89 over and above my head. We did a lot of studies on common security, on what is deterrence philosophy, what is deterrence, and we were paid by the ministry of foreign affairs for writing books. I said books, not just two pages, but I said books, things that were later published as books. Went up to Stockholm and sat for eight hours, members of the, of the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs going through everything we had written, you know, with red lines to say, well, how does this relate to what you said 20 pages earlier? You know, that was an intellectual input. And that's why I said the, the situation is dangerous in Europe because there's nobody who has security and peace and foreign policy intellectualism anymore. It's, it's anyone who has will not join politics. I'm sorry, it's a very arrogant statement, but I can compare what we once had in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, and up to somewhere in the '90s, and what we have today. It's embarrassing to listen to the Swedish prime minister or foreign minister talking about international affairs, but Olof Palme could do it. Bruno Kreisky could do it. Willy Brandt knew what Ostpolitik was and how to keep an open door as a former Berlin mayor and then as chancellor of, of Germany. It's a totally different. We are in a situation today which I call kakistocracy, and kakistocracy means government by the least able and least good people. I'm sorry, but that's where I stand in comparative perspective.
For the past four to five years, it seems that Europe has been slowly becoming militarized, divided, and as we mentioned before we went live on, um, went live here, economically fragile. Economically speaking, Europe is, is, is deteriorating. What do you make of the rapid militarization that is happening across Europe while it is economically deteriorating, and particularly in Germany, in Poland, and of course the Baltic states?
Well, I used to say to people who don't know better, [clears throat] there is not one study anywhere in the world, as far as I know, that proves that military investments give you more development, uh, jobs, employment, investment, uh, trade, goods production, consumerism. It's, it's a total lie that the investment in the military industry has great effects throughout the society. And we can pull up Europe's economy by having setting off 5% of the gross national product for, um, military, for weapons production, on, in gross defense, defense purposes. Um, if you want to, if you want now to improve the, um, uh, European economy, what you do is you disarm and start talking with the opponents you may think you have, which I disagree with. Russia, China, whatever it is that you point out today or tomorrow. I'm 75. I've heard for 75 years that the Russians are coming. And, you know, I say jokingly, you cannot trust these pesky Russians because for 75 years they have not come. Uh, it's like Netanyahu saying, you know, since the early '90s, that means well, 30, 35 years that Iran is going to have nuclear weapons. Well, an idiot who has so many and so bad predictions done repeatedly and does not change his views cannot be a person to be followed. Neither can those people in the military-industrial media academic complex in Europe who are now destroying the European economy. And so, um, I, I, I think it's a very dark perspective for Europe. You have the, the energy, cheap energy that we have said no to because the Americans had an economic warfare on Europe by destroying Nord Stream, and I'm not in doubt that they did. I cannot prove it, but any, any other theory is worse. And you have American top politicians, including Joe Biden at the time, and Madame Nuland, and others who said, "We are going to do it." Now, the rest is somebody in the media who thinks that, oh, you can't say that America did this. Of course, it was America, maybe with the help of Norway, according to some theories by Ola Tonander, who's a very qualified researcher, by the way. And so we're in a situation where you invest enormously on a weaker and weaker economic base, in which China and other countries are growing enormously and surpassing us on point after point in terms of resource, research, education, uh, new products, by cars, etc. I mean, build your dream right there's not going to be a dream in Volkswagen in Germany in the future. I suppose that the, the Chinese will be building Volkswagen in, um, in Germany in the future because we're way behind. And Funke does not understand any of these mechanisms. She's a former defense minister, and she's a person who cannot think independently from Washington, obviously, and that leads us to catastrophe. I'm sorry to say so. We could have a wonderful Europe. We could have a wonderful Europe with cooperating, not loving necessarily, but cooperating with Russia and Ukraine. We could solve the Ukraine question, uh, which is not a Ukraine conflict. It's a NATO-Russia conflict that leads to the violence in Ukraine. Uh, we could solve that long ago in my view, but everybody's obsessed with discussing weapons, what happens on the battlefield, will we have a ceasefire, and all that. And in the end, you know, nobody's talking peace, conflict resolution, mediation. Uh, if you ask me, there were two persons in 2016 or '17 who said the United Nations should come into Ukraine in the Donbass, and one of them was Vladimir Putin, and the other one was Jan Oberg. Now, imagine what 300,000 UN troops could have done in Ukraine at that time for a negotiated solution. Taking the weapons away from the parties, both parties, and sit down and talk. You know where they did that? They did it in the Krajina regions of Croatia. I happened to be quite a lot around. I was, um, partly educated in Yugoslavia. I was down about 100 times. I did mediation with all my colleagues down there, six, five, six people in various places such as Krajina. I knew worked with four or five UN missions. If we had done what we did in Croatia, we could have long ago solved and lived peacefully with each other in my view. But that was not what the West wanted. The West wanted to defeat Russia through the immoral war of letting Ukraine's young people pay the price. It's a disgusting, immoral Europe we have had. Whereas you had moral leaders earlier like Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, etc. I'm not saying I agree with them. Um, Olof Palme was a deeply moral person in this, in the talk about anti-nuclearism, disarmament, common security with the other. The simple formula: I cannot be secure, feel secure if the other party is insecure with me. We can only have common security. What we have built up now with a provocative NATO and hopelessly outdated, it always was, deterrence philosophy and saying, "We want to have weapons by which we can kill you, but we have no intentions to do so." You know, this is why you have armament all over the world because from East to West, to North to South, everybody talks about deterrence, and they've never studied a one word about what deterrence means. To put it on a simple formula, deterrence means that I put a pistol up to your head and say, "Now, Lena, shall we talk?" That's how security is built today. You know, it's, it's, it's a civilizational catastrophe that there's nobody thinking otherwise, whether China or America or Africa or Scandinavia, they're thinking that deterrence, long-range weapons, nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, and all that is a road to peace. Excuse me, I may be the only one, but I think it's a stupid, stupid theory. If it worked, we would have peace long ago.
And, and what's shocking to me is this global normalization of violence. When we, you know, from, from Gaza to Ukraine to Tehran, it seems that the public is, is sort of growing used to seeing these horrible images. Of course, nobody can forget those images that we saw coming from Gaza. And, and it, it seems that this, this perception of violence happening somewhere has been normalized, even though that violence is being inflicted by our governments. But then it seems that there is a very thin line between that violence being somewhere thousands of miles away and then that violence being here domestic when it actually starts to affect those people who previously chose to ignore it. Talk to us about this normalization of violence and, and normalization of war.
Well, I really don't know, um, how this has become possible. One reason is that what everything you and I would call ethics, and let me thank you for raising this question. I think you're the first one who's ever asked me that question in a video. Um, if we start out with ethics, ethics play no role anymore in politics. These, you know, you can, you can get away with bombing Iran, and the Western countries will not even, uh, distance themselves from bombing Iran, but they will accuse Iran for answering against US bases. You can have a genocide going on. You can have interventionism going on. You can have a ridiculing of the United Nations, which is the most Gandhian, whose charter is the most Gandhian and most important document governments have ever signed. You can quote me on that. We cannot do without that type, and the nonviolent ethics is embedded in the UN Charter, and the UN Charter, the UN as such has been sidelined completely since at least Bosnia, if not earlier. And so, long story short, when you have a militarist culture, which we did not have in the first Cold War, but if you have a militarist culture, these kinds of things are okay. Criminality is okay. Violation of international law is okay. United Nations violations is okay. Arrogant politics is okay. Presenting yourself as Jesus is okay because you have God on your side, and you can do what the heck you want outside your exceptionalist country, the United States and Israel, what I call Israel. And so, uh, that's possible. The normalization has to do with another thing, and that is the Western world has lost philosophy. It has lost humanity. It has lost everything that cannot fit into a market. So our universities become places where you get an education to get a job on a marketplace. Who cares about ethics? The market. You sell your work and your knowledge if you have one. Knowledge is smaller than it's ever been in the 50 years I work with knowledge production and been a professor around the world. Um, so if you cut that out, and everything is technology, natural science, let's do what we can do, where ethics is to decide, "We can do this," but for moral reasons, we decide not to. Uh, means full blast for immoral activities, for counterproductive, and even self-destructive activities, because I mean, militarism does destroy yourself, just as Gandhi, Gandhi said, okay, if you use a gun, you kill another person or you harm another person, but you also harm your own, your own soul, because everybody who does bad things are aware somewhere, uh, that they do bad things, the wrong things. I have a dream, not to quote Martin Luther King, but I have a dream. I have this dream to put Western leaders on a plane and bring them from one war zone, war zone, not just hotels, capitals. Bring them down in a war zone where they will risk being shot dead and killed. Okay. To have a flag jacket, okay? And bring them from one war zone where people are dying and killed to another one for about one month, and then bring them back again, those who survive. My hunch would be that some of them would stop doing what they do now. But to most people in the elites, warfare is a game. We have war games, you know, it's kind of thing that happens out there. It happens on a screen. But I have worked in 20-30 conflict areas, war zones over my life. I've not only been an academic, I have been done mediation. I've done conflict analysis. I've talked with people. I've seen people getting killed. I've seen people losing their minds because they went out and killed, particularly in Yugoslavia. And I know that there is something good in most human beings. And if you could give people the experience of seeing what is the ultimate consequence of their policies, I think at least some of them, let's say 50% of them would be enough human beings to say, "I cannot go on doing this." It'll be a little bit like Chaplin's dictator, you know, where he rises and says, "I'm not going to, I'm not going to be a dictator. I'm not going to be a militarist. I'm not going to be a warmonger. I'm not going to kill people in the future." But we need a huge discussion about political ethics. I don't know who can bring it up. I don't see any country that is particularly good at it, would be good at it. But you're raising a hell of an important question. What happened to ethics? Because ethics will also tell you what is right and what is wrong to do to human bodies, to children. Not only children, but children in particular, and men and women. How on earth can we keep on devastating one country after the other? I've seen the destruction in Syria. I was in Aleppo in December '16 when Aleppo was liberated from Al-Nusra, four and a half years occupation. How can you keep on destroying a place of such an amazing history, culture? That was the last point of the Silk, the old Silk Road, Aleppo, Eastern Aleppo. And now they're destroying culture and civilization and the Golestan Palace in Iran. And it doesn't seem to raise an uproar. It doesn't seem to make people say, "What the hell is going on? This is not where warfare. This is a bestial lack of civilization. You don't bomb UNESCO heritage places." And don't tell me it's by accident because 60 places or something, something like that in Iran that has been bombed by that method. So it's, it's, you know, it's a war on civilization and culture. And that's because the Iranians have much more culture and civilization than anybody in the United States and Europe.
War has become a profitable business, and, and I think that's probably one of the reasons why the lobby that, uh, stands behind certain policies, um, has remained in place and has been so successful. How much of today's global instability do you think is being driven by economic interests that are tied directly to the military-industrial complex, both in the United States as well as in Europe?
Let me say, um, I've coined the term MIMAC, and that is an extension of Eisenhower's old military-industrial complex that you mentioned, and I include the military-industrial media academic complex.
Mhm.
Because the academia has become the priesthood, those who interpret what is the right thing to do. They are sitting in all these state-financed institutes, including SIPRI in Stockholm, which is no longer doing anything relevant for peace, become a security institute, state-financed, and therefore is not free research, cannot say and do anything that is against the policies of the governments that support them. And we have very little free research left. The one you talk with now is an example of free research because we are only people-financed. We have no government and no corporate support, and we will not have it, never ever. And we turned 40 years this year. [clears throat] So it's possible to do things differently. But there's no doubt that economics isn't a reasonably important driving force with those who produce the weapons. And you have these swing doors. You know, somebody was a minister, Pentagon, and then becomes a CEO of a military company. And you have the media. I'm sitting in France at the moment, and Le Figaro is owned by the largest aircraft, military aircraft owner. That's the. And so you think that is a free media? You think American re, um, advertisement-financed radio and TV stations financed by, uh, military companies, uh, give people like Kucinich, back in time, a chance to be on, on these shows? Of course not. I know exactly how censorship works. We could do another program on censorship. I have tried, experienced myself. So I refuse to believe that there is one factor that explains such an, an extremely complex thing as today's Western [clears throat] militarism. Uh, it is economic, but it is also a way of thinking. It is a kind of perpetual war because you have this destruction of capital, you have this destruction of countries that then needs to be rebuilt, and you have this destruction of weapons that then have to be rebuilt. And you invent an enemy. That's what intellectuals, among others, do. They invent or endorse views about who is a threat. Like say, the foreign policy institute of some country in Europe will say, "Oh yeah, we, we agree Russia is a huge threat." You know, the moment I hear that, I know it's propaganda because there's no argument behind it. Uh, it's enough today to say 5% of the gross national product, no matter where, whether there's a threat or not. You know, it's like you and I saying in our families, we set off 5% of our monthly income for medicine, nobody, no matter whether anybody is ill or not in the family or looks to be ill in the family and become ill. So the whole thing is now put on the economic formula. It's the economization or, um, commodification of military. That the argument is just, "We need maybe five, maybe six, maybe three." And I tell you, Lena, it might surprise you. There is no other person but me who has written articles critical of that measurement itself, setting off 5%. If we did, I mean, we never done that for health, we never done that for culture, we never done that for infrastructure, we never done that for anything or investments or research or education. What that means is that you don't have to make a threat analysis. You know what a threat analysis was earlier, 20, 30 years ago? It was that you had a number of intellectuals and politicians and diplomats who would sit down and say, "What threatens our country on a time horizon of 10 or 20 years, militarily and in civilian terms?" And then you would come with a, you know, some scenarios of what could happen in the world. It goes well, it goes not so well, and whatever. And if it goes not so well, we will have to plan for those in the middle threats that we can cope with, that are big enough to be relevant, and also within our economic means. And then you would have a public, uh, committee report that would be discussed by people and the governments, two or 300 pages, and then you would decide how much to set off for your defense budget in your country. Now, all this is too intellectually demanding, and therefore, because you just have to call Washington and ask his master's voice, and therefore 5% is all you need. And then you invent. That's what most people don't understand. Threats are invented expost. When you set off off your, your what you want to pay for it, 5%, then we invent it. If, if Russia disappears tomorrow and falls into the ocean, they, it'll take them two weeks to find a new country that is a new threat, or they will say, "Oh, uh, China is a much bigger threat than we ever thought it was." Or, um, you know, I don't know, Nepal. Uh, I'm joking, but this is nothing to do with intellectualism anymore. And that's why you have academics in this. And the media will turn out this and never ask a question. Let me give you a perverse example of it. The Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, when she goes into the synagogue in Copenhagen to, for the commemoration of the 7th of October attack by Hamas on Israel, she says to a journalist, quote, "And if we don't look up, we may also risk that Hamas comes and take Denmark." And the journalist has no questions. You know, we don't have journalism anymore in this field. And we have no peace research. Peace research was a Scandinavian thing. And that's why I'm talking about this because academia, I said academia is part of the military. The MIMAC I talk about, we don't have that. We used to have peace research at 10, 12 universities in Scandinavia. They are all mainstreamed into international relations or security, military security, like SIPRI, like the university institute. It was a heavy tradition in, uh, with Elise Boulding and, and, um, Kenneth Boulding in the United States in the '60s. We had two branches of academic peace. We had 800 programs around the world in which peace, non-violence, conflict resolution, reconciliation, forgiveness was taught. I've been a teacher of peace studies in a number of countries myself. Today it's gone. It's gone. There's nobody studying it. I think it was Trump took over the American, the US Peace Institute and called it something, you know, that's where we are. It's been Trumpified. Uh, I used to say peace has disappeared, and that's what it has. Um, I refuse, I'm too old to do something new, and I would never do anything else in my life, and so I consider myself being a specialist in peace and future research with a heavy influence from Gandhi and my colleagues over 50 years who taught me a lot. Among them, I always name mention Johan Galtung. So long story short, whatever could have been part of an alternative to the MIMAC, uh, is at the moment gone. But it won't be gone in the future. I'm totally optimistic, uh, beyond, let's say, five to seven years from now. If we survive the next five to seven years, we're going to have a fantastic world, and peace will come back as a beautiful thing, and we will not have a corrupted Nobel Peace Prize anymore.